Getting Started with FPGAs 1 - Altera Quartus II and ModelSim Installation and "Hello World" Demo

This is a tutorial video to introduce you to FPGAs. This video covers the following topics:
- Installing Altera Quartus II software
- Installing Mentor Graphics ModelSim Altera Edition
- Creating a very basic "Hello World" circuit in the BDF editor
- Compiling your circuit design in Quartus II
- Compiling your circuit design in ModelSim
- Simulation of your design using a provided VHDL testbench
- Observing testbench signal values in the waveform viewer

Download link for "testbench.vhd": http://pastebin.com/T7dEYZ3a

I am producing this video in the hope that it will be useful for others. It assumes you understand the purpose of an FPGA and have a basic understanding of digital circuits.

If you enjoyed this video, let me know, and I will consider making more for this series.

Please do not private message me questions. Instead, ask them publicly so that other people may benefit from the answers.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• yt:quality=high
• fpga
• jtag
• altera
• quartus
• ii
• modelsim
• vhdl
• windows
• installation
• tutorial
• howto

[aquadog90]

hi can you suggest cheap board to buy which I can practice on?

[brianez21]

@aquadog90 The DE series made by Terasic is a good little board. Check out their website. They have US distributors if you don't want to pay as much for shipping. Check out Digikey and Adafruit.

[RetroRepair]

This is excellent but I have to ask, how come the output did not flip instantly? Is this an accurate representation of how long it takes the FPGA to perform an instruction?

[aquadog90]

hi I get an error when compailing that the entity WORK does not contain the project tutorial1. Althrough I did save the project as tutorial1... I think the problem is that I have saved the project somewhere else... Do you know the origianl directory so I can move the project back to WORK pls.

[NotoriousRampage]

Finally a decent modelsim tutorial. Modelsim is the most complicated software I've ever seen !

[Bnoinhovaem]

Thanks you for very nice tuturial. It's very helpful for me.

[paintballsonora]

good job

[didojonas]

Dear Brian! Thank you sooo much for the video! I newly bought a DE2-115 board, so now I am trying to learn VHDL. I heard that it was not possible to do simulation on the newest edition of Quartus II, but you actually did it. I am going to try it my self. Please keep posting more videoes. Thank You! :-D