How commonly used are the xilinx chips?

Question

I'm beginning to learn embedded with C (and maybe some C++) and someone from the office said they're willing to donate a free xilinx chip they've got sitting on their shelf. I was thinking more along the lines of an Arduino, especially that the Arduino tutorials and sample projects are abundant.

• Can someone confirm how xilinx chips compare to arduino? Are they known within the industry to be more "real world" in any way? or not?

• Are there specific xilinx chips (maybe older models) that I should avoid, at least while I'm still starting out?

• Do they have a relatively steeper learning curve than an Arduino due to lack of tutorials or not?

I'm interested in hearing whatever comes to your mind when you hear xilinx as opposed to Arduino. I know very little about chips, let alone this particular one, so it's very hard to have any informed comparison.

Answer 1

Xilinx chips are very commonly used, but not for what you want. Xilinx makes FPGAs and CPLDs, which are programmed with VHDL and Verilog (not respectively, both are programmed with both). They are used for prototyping logic circuits to be turned into integrated circuits. If you wanted to make your own ARM chip, for example, you could buy some code from ARM and put it on an FPGA from Xilinx and then program the result in C. I'm not recommending that, just trying to give you an idea of what these beasts are for. Anyway, Arduino is a solid platform for what you want. Go with that.