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Altera_Forum
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16 years ago

Newbie Question on Cyclone III

Hi, I’ve done a lot of x86 Assembly and C programming in the past and have wanted to play around with microcontroller programming for a while. Initially I’d like to start with simple “hello world” ap...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
16 years ago

VHDL is more a hardware description language than a programming language. You can do simple logic and state machines quite easily. It can also be good to do repetitive tasks, such as filtering, video processing. But for complex algorithms, it may be a better idea to switch to a CPU and use a programming language such as C.

If you don't have a license for the Nios CPU, it will work in evaluation mode. It will work as long as you keep the USB cable connected, or if you disconnect it the CPU only works for a limited amount of time (1 hour, usually).