Hello my readers, long time – no talk 
. Work, studies and my lazyness lead to making this blog almost dead. Additionally, I have bought a new domain (www.scrts.net) and was thinking to revive this blog on the other server, but many blog fallowers asked me to update my blog as is. So thats it, I have made a major comeback!
Firstly, my bad, but my FPGA designs were slowed, but I am still trying to learn design in small steps, so here You can see my additional boards. 
I have bought a breakout board for FX2 connector, which was a waste of money since the FX2 connector has 100 pins, remove JTAG pins, additional clock, many pins are connected together with LEDS on the board or other devices, also its better not to connect Your LVTTL pins to differential IO pins, finally we have about 20 useful pins… Anyway, as seen in the photo I have made two additional boards by myself. The one on the left is a board with Atmel ATmega8L, which runs from 3.3V, connected to the FPGA for I2C and SPI tests.
Too bad my SPI tests fails, but I am not sure if I done everything correct in ATmega8L which currently is SPI master.
The board on the right is 4x7SEG display, common anode, so it uses 8 wires for segments (dot included), 4 wires for digit selection, also VCC and GND, so guess how many free ports will be left if I don’t want to use cross-connection to LEDS?
Thats it for now. After success in SPI and/or I2C design, I am planning to run DDR SDRAM controller, device independent, because Xilinx offers using MIG (Memory Interface Generator), which is device locked and also really hard to control. If I will manage to get more money I am also planing to migrate to Altera and buy some board with bigger capacity FPGA which include PCI-E maybe.
#1 by Justas on April 17, 2010 - 8:31 pm
Why migrating to Altera?
#2 by admin on April 17, 2010 - 9:44 pm
Huge software bugs (even check syntax doesn’t work in ISE 11.4), frequency instability, shitty IP cores (like MIG), lack of documentation…
I’ve bought Altera BeMicro devboard, soon about it here 
#3 by FPGA on April 18, 2010 - 6:32 pm
Whether you choose to get your entire training toward becoming a computer engineer in the classroom or through online courses, you may be on your way to a career that’s stable and financially rewarding. Maybe your electrical engineering and computer science knowledge will lead to the next big breakthrough in computer engineering?
#4 by admin on April 18, 2010 - 8:46 pm
Since I am in 3rd course of bachelor degree, there is no FPGA classes in my uni. If I will go for master degree, there will be FPGA class, but there will be only first steps to FPGA design… Actually, nobody here in uni work with FPGA like professional. One prof use Altera with Verilog, other one use Lattice for LED display programmed in ABEL language… No Xilinx and no VHDL. I am learning it only by myself.
Partially answering Your question: I am thinking of searching for a company which works with FPGAs/ASICs and could give me some work that I could do for free… Maybe this knowledge would let me to do the “breakthrough”