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PicoBlaze - Program RAM Access for an Interactive Monitor

Victor Yurkovsky June 14, 20132 comments

I have a confession to make: I love PicoBlaze!  There are many reasons to love it.  It is a tiny CPU (96 Spartan3 slices or 26 Spartan6 slices plus a BRAM).  It is simple.  It is bug-free.  It's pretty fast.  It can reduce the size and the complexity of your design - instead of debugging a big state machine, just throw one (or more) of these in.  Add a serial output and you can debug your fpga from inside out!However, there are a few problems.  The...


Using GHDL for interactive simulation under Linux

Martin Strubel October 24, 2011

The opensource and free VHDL simulator 'GHDL' has been out for many years, but like many other opensource tools, it has caught limited attention from the industry. I can hear you thinking: 'If it doesn't cost money, it can't be worth it'. Well, I hope this short overview will change your mind and even whet your appetite for more. Because, using some extensions, you can do some quite funky stuff with it that will save you a lot of debugging work. For example, simulate your real world software...


Using GHDL for interactive simulation under Linux

Martin Strubel October 24, 2011

The opensource and free VHDL simulator 'GHDL' has been out for many years, but like many other opensource tools, it has caught limited attention from the industry. I can hear you thinking: 'If it doesn't cost money, it can't be worth it'. Well, I hope this short overview will change your mind and even whet your appetite for more. Because, using some extensions, you can do some quite funky stuff with it that will save you a lot of debugging work. For example, simulate your real world software...


PicoBlaze - Program RAM Access for an Interactive Monitor

Victor Yurkovsky June 14, 20132 comments

I have a confession to make: I love PicoBlaze!  There are many reasons to love it.  It is a tiny CPU (96 Spartan3 slices or 26 Spartan6 slices plus a BRAM).  It is simple.  It is bug-free.  It's pretty fast.  It can reduce the size and the complexity of your design - instead of debugging a big state machine, just throw one (or more) of these in.  Add a serial output and you can debug your fpga from inside out!However, there are a few problems.  The...