Binary Divider

[Altera_Forum]

Hi, I'm a new user and want to get used to the Quartus environment to create my own simple binary divider (like the lpm_divider). So wondered if anyone could give me any hints/tips/help please?

[Altera_Forum]

If you are just wanting to try out the Altera tool, then you can just instantiate the lpm_divide module in your test HDL and run it through Quartus II's synthesis and place&route. Or, you can write your own HDL code to implement a binary divider if you want (but for the purpose of taking Quartus for a test drive, I think it doesn't matter). 

 Quartus->File menu has a New Project wizard that takes you through the steps of creating a new Quartus project (just define where your HDL is, what FPGA are you targeting, etc)  There is a button on Quartus that looks like the "play" button on a DVD player; clicking on that runs the design through all the necessary tools, pretty simple.

[Altera_Forum]

Found some arithmetic design examples in the following link. You may also want to try it out. 

 http://www.altera.com/support/examples/exm-arithmetic.html

[Altera_Forum]

Do you want a pipelined divider (result every clock cycle after an initial latency) or a serial divider (low throughput)? 

 Pipelined dividers are big due to the nature of division whereas serial dividers are fairly tiny (approximately 2.5 LEs per bit roughly). A serial divider performs division by using long division which is why it's so small (because the operation is just shift, compare, and subtract). You can also make hybrid serial + parallel dividers where multiple bits are operated on each clock cycle.  If you can't find anything leave me a message and I'll see if I can find one of mine.

[Altera_Forum]

I would say have a look at these books as a starting point 

 Computer Organisation & Design - Patterson and Hennessey Digital Arithmetic - Ercegovac and Lang Computer Arithmetic Algoithms - Isreal Koren  and to a lesser degree this one  Elementary Functions: Algorithms and Implementation - Muller  Trying to implement any mathematical algorithm in hardware might be heavy going to begin but the end result can be very lucrative ;)