ece5760

2 Articles

A Modular Logic Analyzer For FPGAs

May 26, 2019 by 4 Comments

When working on a project, it’s incredibly helpful to be able to visualize the various signals in play. This is important when attempting to determine if what is supposed to be happening is actually happening. However, logic analyzers can be expensive, so a group from [Bruce Land]’s ECE5760 class developed their own hardware solution instead.

The primary idea behind the project is modularity. The basic building blocks of the logic analyser are coded in Verilog. They’re designed so that the number of channels and added functions can be mixed and match to suit the given purpose and the capabilities of the target FPGA platform. The team’s logic analyzer is also capable of decoding SPI and I2C in hardware, and has a graphical user interface running on an attached laptop for visualizing signals.

It’s a tidy build, and an excellent project to learn the fundamentals of both FPGA programming and the various communications protocols involved. [Bruce Land]’s classes are a hotbed of FPGA projects, from pokerbots to NES chiptune emulators. Video after the break.

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Gravity Simulations With An FPGA

January 2, 2017 by 25 Comments

Gravity can be a difficult thing to simulate effectively on a traditional CPU. The amount of calculation required increases exponentially with the number of particles in the simulation. This is an application perfect for parallel processing.

For their final project in ECE5760 at Cornell, [Mark Eiding] and [Brian Curless] decided to use an FPGA to rapidly process gravitational calculations. This allows them to simulate a thousand particles at up to 10 frames per second. With every particle having an attraction to every other, this works out to an astonishing 1 million inverse-square calculations per frame!

The team used an Altera DE2-115 development board to build the project. General operation is run by a Nios II processor, which handles the VGA display, loads initial conditions and controls memory. The FPGA is used as an accelerator for the gravity calculations, and lends the additional benefit of requiring less memory access operations as it runs all operations in parallel.

This project is a great example of how FPGAs can be used to create serious processing muscle for massively parallel tasks. Check out this great article on sorting with FPGAs that delves deeper into the subject. Video after the break.

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