struggling with general digital design

Hi everyone! I am new to digital design and need some general advice on
it.

I have experience with microcontrollers and other chips, but when it
comes to designing with FPGAs, I am having difficulty starting
moderately complex projects. I am comfortable enough with VHDL that I
think I should be able to start solving more advanced problems. VHDL is
not the problem.

I think the problem is that I don't know how to design a complex
digital system. I tried thinking in software, but it doesn't seem like
a good idea, too much time is spent on simple things. The elementary
digital design course I took some time ago doesn't seem to help much:
knowing basic logic gates/theorems and minimizing equations with K-maps
doesn't do me any good.

Currently I am trying to design a system with ADC -> ISSI RAM ->
FFTcore -> ISSI RAM -> DAC.

ADC obtains data, stores it in external SRAM, then FFT core takes this
data from RAM and stores its results in another block of RAM. Then the
results are output from RAM to DAC.

I need general advice on how to approach the design of this system.
Should I start with a block diagram, and try to work out simple blocks
of my system?

I already have working code where ADC loads data to FGPA and this data
is immediately sent to DAC. I also can read/write from external RAM (as
a separate block). But I don't know how to connect the two blocks
together. I don't feel like I am spending my time productively at the
moment.

Any advice would be highly appreciated. Thanks in advance, Pavel

.

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