cpld

41 Articles

A Better Way To Plug A CPLD Into A Breadboard

February 4, 2016 by 62 Comments

If you read my first post about a simple CPLD do-it-yourself project you may remember that I seriously wiffed when I made the footprint 1” wide, which was a bit too wide for common solderless breadboards. Since then I started over, having fixed the width problem, and ended up with a module that looks decidedly… cuter.

To back up a little bit, a Complex Programmable Logic Device (CPLD) is a cool piece of hardware to have in your repertoire and it can be used to learn logic or a high level design language or replace obsolete functions or chips. But a CPLD needs a little bit of support infrastructure to become usable, and that’s what I’ll be walking you through here. So if you’re interested in learning CPLDs, or just designing boards for them, read on!

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Antti Lukats: The Past, Present, And Future Of Programmable Logic

December 19, 2015 by 14 Comments

[Antti] has gained a bit of a reputation over on Hackaday.io – he has a tremendous number of FPGA projects on hackaday.io, and they’re all open source. If you’re looking for street cred with FPGAs, [Antti] has it. His Hands-on experience with FPGAs and CPLDs stretches back to the very first chips in the 70s. We’re so happy that he’s working to share this depth of knowledge, and that includes this talk he gave a few weeks ago at the Hackaday SuperConference. Take a look and then join us after the break for an overview of the FPGA terrain, then and now.

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Not Ready For FPGAs? Try A CPLD

December 19, 2015 by 24 Comments

[Kodera2t]  wanted to experiment with programmable logic. Instead of going with an FPGA board, he decided to build his own CPLD (complex programmable logic device) board, with a built-in programmer. The CPLD is a Xilinx 9536 which is inexpensive and, though obsolete, still readily available. The programmer for the board uses an FT232RL and the total cost is very low ([kodera2t] says it is in the price range of a Raspberry Pi Zero or about $4).

From a user’s point of view, a CPLD is just a small FPGA. Internally, there is a significant difference in how they implement your design. Although there are differences between different product families, CPLDs usually use a sea of logic gates arranged as an AND/OR chain. By feeding inputs and inverted inputs into the AND gates and then ORing the results, you can build interesting logic circuits. However, modern CPLDs use Verilog or VHDL, so you describe what you want just like with an FPGA and the software figures out how to use the underlying circuits to give you what you want.

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Build An AM Radio Transmitter From A CPLD

November 12, 2015 by 35 Comments

[Alex Lao] has been playing around with the CPLD-like parts of a PSoC. Which is to say, he’s been implementing simple logic functions “in hardware” in software. And after getting started with the chip by getting accustomed to the different clock sources, he built a simple AM radio that transmits at 24 MHz.

The device that [Alex] is learning on is a Cypress PSoC 5LP, or more specifically their (cheap) prototyping kit for the part. The chip itself is an ARM microprocessor core with a CPLD and some analog tidbits onboard to make interfacing the micro with the outside world a lot easier. [Alex] doesn’t even mess around with the microprocessor, he’s interested in learning the CPLD side of things.

PRS-CircuitHe starts off with a 24 MHz carrier and a 1 kHz tone signal, and combines them with a logical AND function. When the tone is on, the carrier plays through; that’s AM radio at its most elemental. Everything is logic (square waves) so it’s a messy radio signal, but it’ll get the job done.

Adding a multiplexer up front allows [Alex] to play two tones over his “radio” station. Not bad for some simple logic, and a fantastic Hello World project for a CPLD. We can’t wait to see what [Alex] is up to next!

If you’re interested in getting your feet wet with either CPLDs in general or a CPLD + micro system like Cypress’s, the development kit that [Alex] is using looks like a cheap and painless way to start. (Relatively speaking — PSoCs are a step or two up a steep learning curve from the simpler 8-bit micros or an Arduino.) Hackaday’s own [Bil Herd] has a video on getting started with another member of the Cypres PSoC family, so you should also check that out.

Programmable Logic: Build Yourself A CPLD Module

October 28, 2015 by 80 Comments

A Complex Programmable Logic Device (CPLD) is a great piece of hardware to have in your repertoire. As its name implies, you can program these chips to serve the logic functions you need. This might be replacing an obsolete chip, or maybe just a way to learn and try different techniques. What better way to learn than to get your hands on a CPLD and give it a try?

I created a CPLD module with the intent of being able to plug it into lots of things including solderless breadboards, but I screwed up. It seems that the plugin space available on a solderless breadboard is 1.1”, I had made the footprint 1” wide leaving no room for a row of wires on both sides. Duh.

But let me back up and show more about what I’m doing , I wanted to make a programmable piece of logic that could be built as a kit one could easily solder at home, could be programmed in-circuit, and could work at 3.3 or 5 volts.

Image5bTo implement an easily solderable kit I went with an older CPLD part that also has 3.3v and 5v versions that will maintain its programming regardless of power. The logic itself is a CPLD IC from the Altera Max family with two versions that fit the board with either 32 or 64 macrocells. A macrocell is the basic logic building block and it is programmed with logic “terms” and then interconnected to other macrocells through a programmable interconnect.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: An Open Source Graphics Card

June 15, 2015 by 22 Comments

For last year’s Hackaday Prize, [PK] tried to build a video card for microcontrollers and headless Linux systems. It was only 640×480 resolution VGA, but the entire project was designed around a CPLD communicating with a microcontroller over SPI. This prize entry was, by [PK]’s own admission, a failure. It was late, but now he’s had an entire year to perfect his design. That means he can enter version two of his VGATonic in The Hackaday Prize.

The VGATonic version 2 uses a Xilinx XC95144XL CPLD for the VGA timing, and an ATTiny 2313a to read the SPI bus. Video memory is four megabits of static RAM. That’ls pretty much all you need for the most basic VGA graphics card, and all of this is packed onto a 3×3 inch PCB.

You can do a lot with 640×480 8-bit graphics running at 25FPS. In the video below, [PK] has a ‘hello world’ of sorts, Doom, running on a Raspberry Pi 2 with his SPI graphics card. Yes, it’s a graphics card for the Raspberry Pi, and it looks really good.

Further refinements of the design will include some primitive graphics routines. Not OpenGL or anything fancy, just something to reduce the number of writes on the SPI bus. It’s a great project, and perfect if you want to add video out to an Intel Galileo or other microcontroller project. [PK] has a video demo, you can check that out below.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Very, Very Small Logic

June 4, 2015 by 55 Comments

Despite the existence of FPGAs and CPLDs, there’s still a necessity for very small programmable logic devices. GALs, PALs, and other old tech just won’t cut it, though, and so we are left with a new generation of programmable devices that aren’t microcontrollers or CPUs. The GreenPAC from Silego fill this niche quite nicely, with the ability to implement counters, ADCs, logic glue, level shifting, and comparators in a single chip. For any homebrew electronics tinkerer, these devices have one very obvious problem: they’re really, really small. The smallest GreenPAC device has 12 pins stuffed into a 1.6 x 1.6mm QFN package. You’re not hand soldering this thing.

For [Nick Johnson]’s Hackaday Prize entry, he’s taking these small programmable logic chips and making it easy to create your own custom ICs. Basically, it’s a breakout board for GreenPAC devices that stuffs these tiny chips onto a much more reasonable DIP package.

Breakouts aren’t enough, and to program these small chips, [Nick] is also building a board based on an ARM microcontroller. With USB input, a way to generate the 7.5V used for programming, and a breadboard friendly format, this programmer will tell these tiny chips what to do.

Not many people are building stuff with PALs and GALs anymore, but there are still a lot of work that can be done with small programmable chips. There’s certainly a place for tiny programmable logic chips like this, and anything that gets them in to the hands of more people is okay in our book.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by: