fpga

533 Articles

Learn Verilog In Your Browser

September 26, 2018 by 13 Comments

We are big fans of tools in the browser for education. You have a consistent environment maintained by someone else, you don’t have to install anything, and you can work from any computer you happen to find yourself. The HDLBits site has a great set of Verilog “exams” that would be a big help to anyone trying to learn or brush up on their Verilog skills.

The site offers a range of topics that go from the silly (output a constant 1 or 0) to full-blown state machines and testbenches. The site isn’t tutorial in nature, instead it offers a problem, an optional hint, and an editing window with some code already in place. You add your code and hit submit. Behind the scenes, the site runs Intel Quartus and Modelsim to test your work. It will either show you the results or tell you that you failed.

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Using An FPGA To Navigate China’s Railroads

September 23, 2018 by 19 Comments

If you’re headed over to mainland China as a tourist, it’s possible to get to most of the country by rail. China is huge though, about the same size as the United States and more than twice the size of the European Union. Traveling that much area isn’t particularly easy. There are over 300 train terminals in China, and finding the quickest route somewhere is not obvious at all. This is an engineering challenge waiting to be solve, and luckily some of the students at Cornell Engineering have taken a stab at efficiently navigating China’s rail system using an FPGA.

The FPGA runs an algorithm for finding the shortest route between two points, called Dijkstra’s algorithm. With so many nodes this can get cumbersome for a computer to calculate, but the parallel processing of a dedicated FPGA speeds up the process significantly. The FPGA also includes something called a “hard processor system“, or HPS. This is not a soft-core, but dedicated computing hardware in the form of an ARM Cortex-A9. Testing showed that utilizing both the HPS and the FPGA can speed up the computation by up to ten times over a microcontroller alone.

This project goes into extreme detail on the methodology and the background of the math and coding involved, and is definitely worth a read if you’re interested in FPGAs or traveling salesman-esque problems. FPGAs aren’t the only dedicated hardware you can use to solve these kinds of problems though, if you have a big enough backpack while you’re traveling around China you could also use a different kind of computer.

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Turning A Tiny FLIR Into An Action Cam With FPGAs

September 13, 2018 by 18 Comments

FLIR are making some really great miniature thermal cameras these days, designed for applications such as self-driving cars, and tools that help keep firefighters safe. That’s great and all, but these thermal cameras are so cool, you really just want to play with one. That’s what [greg] was thinking when he designed a PCB backpack that captures thermal images from a FLIR Boson and stores it on an SD card. It’s a thermal action cam, and an impressive bit of FPGA development, too.

The FLIR product in question is a Boson 640, an impressive little camera that records in 640×512 resolution, with a 60 Hz update rate. This one’s got the 95° field of view, giving it a very good specification in a very small footprint. This is a huge improvement over FLIR’s Tau camera, for which [greg] built a breakout board with Ethernet and DDR memory a few years ago. Once he found out about the Boson, he figured a backpack PCB for this camera would be possible and a great excuse to teach himself FPGAs with a hands-on project.

With an impressive ability to find the perfect part, [greg] sourced a Lattice iCE40 FPGA in an 8×8 mm package along with an 8 Mbit HyperRAM in a 6×8 package. This combination allows for all the chips to fit behind the Boson camera. Add in an microSD card slot and a few connectors and this breakout board is very close to being a commercial product, for whatever forward looking infrared needs you might have.

CORDIC Brings Math To FPGA Designs

September 7, 2018 by 12 Comments

We are always excited when we see [Hamster] post an FPGA project, because it is usually something good. His latest post doesn’t disappoint and shows how he uses the CORDIC algorithm to generate very precise sine and cosine waves in VHDL. CORDIC (Coordinate Rotation Digital Computer; sometimes known as Volder’s algorithm) is a standard way to compute hyperbolic and trigonometric functions. What’s nice is that the algorithm only requires addition, subtraction, bit shifts, and a lookup table with an entry for each bit of precision you want. Of course, if you have addition and negative numbers, you already have subtraction. This is perfect for simple CPUs and FPGAs.

[Hamster] not only has the VHDL code but also provides a C version if you find that easier to read. In either case, the angle is scaled so that 360 degrees is a full 24-bit word to allow the most precision. Although it is common to compute the result in a loop, with the FPGA, you can do all the math in parallel and generate a new sample on each clock cycle.

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How To Add UART To Your FPGA Projects

September 6, 2018 by 18 Comments

Being able to communicate between a host computer and a project is often a key requirement, and for FPGA projects that is easily done by adding a submodule like a UART. A Universal Asynchronous Receiver-Transmitter is the hardware that facilitates communications with a serial port, so you can send commands from a computer and get messages in return.

Last week I wrote about an example POV project that’s a good example for learn. It was both non-trivial and used the board’s features nicely. But it has the message hard coded into the Verilog which means you need to rebuild the FPGA every time you want to change it. Adding a UART will allow us to update that message.

The good news is the demo is open source, so I forked it on GitHub so you can follow along with my new demo. To illustrate how you can add a UART to this project I made this simple plan:

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Visualizing Verilog Simulation

September 3, 2018 by 16 Comments

You don’t usually think of simulating Verilog code — usually for an FPGA — as a visual process. You write a test script colloquially known as a test bench and run your simulation. You might get some printed information or you might get a graphical result by dumping a waveform, but you don’t usually see the circuit. A new site combines Yosys and a Javascript-based logic simulator to let you visualize and simulate Verilog in your browser. It is a work in progress on GitHub, so you might find a few hiccups like we did, but it is still an impressive piece of work.

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Learn FPGA With This Persistence Of Vision Hack

August 31, 2018 by 11 Comments

Everybody wants to give FPGA development a try and here’s a great way to get into it. You can build your own Persistence of Vision display using a $30 dev board. It’s a fun project, and you’ll learn quite a bit about designing for an FPGA, as well as using the Quartus design software.

The inspiration for this article comes from [vpecanins] who did an example project where you wave the board back and forth and a message appears in mid air. This uses the MAX1000, a pretty powerful yet odd FPGA board for about $30. It contains an Intel MAX10 (when did Intel start making FPGAs? Remember, Intel bought Alterra back in 2015). I find the board odd because it also holds an accelerometer that you can talk to using SPI. That’s a little strange for a generic FPGA board, but paired with eight on-board LEDs it’s perfect for this demo.

Since I didn’t find any written documentation for this example, I thought we’d help out and take you on a step-by-step tour of the project. What’s more, in a future installment, I’ll show you how to make some significant changes to the tutorial that will make it even more practical as a base for other projects.

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