Oh, my friend, I’m in my 40s now and while I’ve never touched ladder logic (mostly on purpose), I can honestly say I’ve been writing C since the last century and C++ only a few years less. I remember, with pain in my heart, what C++ looked like before C++11, C++14, and C++17. C++03 had just come out when I started and lots of features even there weren’t really all that baked in the toolchains at them time :).
Zynq is super cool and strongly agree that it’s worth looking into, although starting with just a naked little FPGA board might be more approachable. On the other hand, if you’re sufficiently capable with both embedded Linux and Verilog to successfully implement a piece of hardware in the PL and build a driver and userspace for it in the PS, you’re definitely miles ahead of most candidates.
TI/Octavo chips with the PRUs are kind of similar; not that they’re asynchronous logic like the Zynq PL is, but they’re similarly powerful as far as doing hard real-time deterministic jobs driven by an attached Linux core.
Depends what kind of work you do, as product development is different from factory journeyman. I don't see a chaotic market supporting many domestic product development projects for the next 2 years. =3
Zynq is super cool and strongly agree that it’s worth looking into, although starting with just a naked little FPGA board might be more approachable. On the other hand, if you’re sufficiently capable with both embedded Linux and Verilog to successfully implement a piece of hardware in the PL and build a driver and userspace for it in the PS, you’re definitely miles ahead of most candidates.
TI/Octavo chips with the PRUs are kind of similar; not that they’re asynchronous logic like the Zynq PL is, but they’re similarly powerful as far as doing hard real-time deterministic jobs driven by an attached Linux core.