Grandiose Delusions
Recently on the MyHDL mailing-list there have been discussions about some other immature Python/HDL tools. In these discussion it was mentioned, how over the years, there has not been a strong set of open-source IP developed using MyHDL. For those that might be unfamiliar with the term IP (intellectual property) it is a term widely used in digital hardware to refer to reusable hardware components or blocks.
Many design languages have relied on that first big...
State Machine ‘v’ Micro in a FPGA
Designing a system and considering if to have a FPGA in the first place is something a engineer should always consider. However one thing that people look to do is designing a microcontroller on a FPGA and in this post I want to consider why we would do it at all and what would be the real consideration for doing this.
We first look at what's available in the microcontroller world. We have a vast range from tiny 8bit 6 pin devices right the way up to monster 32bit devices. These...
My VHDL <= monpjc; Journey
I always like to start my first blog on a website with a bit of a introduction as to who I am and what I’ll be writting about. I feel this gives you the reader a opportunity to see where I’m coming from and understand a little of my point of view. So when I was asked to come and start blogging on FPGARelated I wondered what I should say. So for my first blog its all about how me, aka monpjc, and how I got into VHDL.
It started a long time ago when I was working for a...
MyHDL FPGA Tutorial I (LED Strobe)
Last updated 05-Nov-2015
IntroductionFrom many perspectives the latest FPGA offerings from 'X' and 'A' are large devices - mucho programmable logic resources. Even the devices that one can get for sub \$10 are relatively large. Because of the size of these FPGAs they are implemented using an HDL. To manually configure each circuit would be a long and tedious task. It is not feasible to program an FPGA by manually defining the logic for each LUT and manually...
Oscilloscope Dreams
My coworkers and I recently needed a new oscilloscope. I thought I would share some of the features I look for when purchasing one.
When I was in college in the early 1990's, our oscilloscopes looked like this:
Now the cathode ray tubes have almost all been replaced by digital storage scopes with color LCD screens, and they look like these:
Oscilloscopes are basically just fancy expensive boxes for graphing voltage vs. time. They span a wide range of features and prices:...
FPGA or DSP Processor - Parameters to Make the Right Choice
Introduction
Digital Signal Processing (DSP) has a huge global market that is growing fast day by day with rapidly evolving sophisticated modern electronics applications like 3G wireless, voice over internet protocol (VoIP), multimedia systems, radar and satellite systems, medical systems, image-processing applications and consumer electronics. These sophisticated DSP applications pose many conflicting challenges to system designers and application developers in terms of cost and...
Using GHDL for interactive simulation under Linux
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...
VHDL tutorial - A practical example - part 3 - VHDL testbench
In part 1 of this series we focused on the hardware design, including some of the VHDL definitions of the I/O characteristics of the CPLD part. In part 2, we described the VHDL logic of the CPLD for this design. In part 3, we will show the entire VHDL design and the associated tests used to prove that we have, in fact, designed what we started out to design.
First, let's pull all of the pieces of the prior design together into a...
Verilog vs VHDL
Introduction
Verilog and VHDL are two industry standard Hardware Description Languages (HDL) that are used in writing programs for electronic integrated circuits (ICs) i.e., ASIC and FPGA. Many system designers face this issue: which HDL language to choose – Verilog or VHDL. The answer is by no means easy or trivial. Both of these languages are widely compared and contrasted without any clearly defined victor. Both of them have their own merits and demerits and have different...
VHDL tutorial - A practical example - part 2 - VHDL coding
In part 1 of this series we focused on the hardware design, including some of the VHDL definitions of the I/O characteristics of the CPLD part. In part 2, we will describe the VHDL logic of the CPLD for this design.
With any design, the first step to gather the requirements for the job at hand. From part 1 of this article, I have copied two sections that address some of the requirements for the CPLD design.
The data acquisition engine has the...
FPGA Assemblers and Time Machines
Flashback to 1986. A young man has a crazy idea - he wants to make a CPU all by himself. He is reading early Xilinx manuals cover to cover as if they were novels. Yes, you are quick - this is indeed a (mostly) true story about me and my dream, suddenly made possible by this new FPGA technology.
Sadly more than 20 years went by before my first CPU ran in a Xilinx FPGA. Why did it take so long? Every few years I set up the tools and every time I walked away, scared silly. As the years...
binary hello world
Python + Ohio + MyHDL + FPGARecently I had the opportunity to coordinate a hands-on programmable hardware (FPGA) workshop (open-space) at a regional Python conference - @pyohio. The workshop was for those that had little to no exposure to programmable hardware. For this situation I used two basic examples: two versions of a binary hello world.
The binary hello world -- blinking an LED -- is a good starting point to introduce programmable hardware, hardware descriptions languages,...
New Discussion Group: DSP & FPGA
I have just created a new discussion group for engineers implementing DSP functions on FPGAs. The creation of this group has been on my todo list for a long time. If you want to join the group, send a blank email to: fpgadsp-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
As usual, it should take a few weeks before there are enough members for interesting discussions to get started.
PicoBlaze - Program RAM Access for an Interactive Monitor
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...
Little to no benefit from C based HLS
Last updated 07-Nov-2015
As I write this I am on a plane and my destination is EELive 2014 where I am going to give a talk hardware design: the grunge era. It is a shotgun introduction to three alternative hardware description languages (alt.hdl). The three languages briefly introduced in the talk are: bsv, chisel, and myhdl. The goal of the talk is simply to raise awareness of the three...
Elliptic Curve Digital Signatures
A digital signature is used to prove a message is connected to a specific sender. The sender can not deny they sent that message once signed, and no one can modify the message and maintain the signature. The message itself is not necessarily secret. Certificates of authenticity, digital cash, and software distribution use digital signatures so recipients can verify they are getting what they paid for.
Since messages can be of any length and mathematical algorithms always use fixed...
Cutting a Path Forward
Introduction
As a newcomer to the community, I thought I would start off by introducing myself, and give a little information about what has drawn me to start working with FPGAs.
My day job is as a professional software developer: Figure out what people want; figure out how to make it happen (if possible); and then wrangle code, databases, networks, and servers into giving the correct responses or actions as necessary.
By night, however, I've been working on my...
USB-FPGA : Introduction
This blog is an introduction to a series of blogs I hope to write. The blogs will cover the design and experiences I had on a project that spanned the last 6 years. The project was the development of an USB FPGA board and the supporting gateware, firmware, and software. The project has had different levels of activity over the years, ranging from none to some, but it has been an ongoing project, albeit, during sleepless nights. Lately, I have ported the HDL (gateware)...
MyHDL FPGA Tutorial II cont. (Echo, Audio Interface)
IntroductionTo demonstrate the echo on an FPGA board an interface to an audio ADC/DAC chip will be used. The following will explain the connection to the audio codec and the HDL module used to interface.
Audio Codec InterfaceI have two boards with TI AIC23b audio codecs. The AIC23 has a configuration interface (ability to program the registers) and a streaming audio interface. The SPI mode will be used to configure the codec and the I2S interface is used to send and...
MyHDL Interface Example
MyHDL Interfaces ExampleWith the next release of MyHDL, version 0.9, conversion of interfaces will be supported. In this context an interface is any object with a Signal attribute. This can be used to simplify connection between modules and port definitions. For example, if I want to define a simple memory-map bus, the Signals for the bus can be defined as follows:
class BareBoneBus: def __init__(self): self.wr = Signal(False) self.rd =...Designing a FPGA Micro Pt2 - Clock and Counter build and test.
So last time I looked and talked about designing my own PIC12F509. I concluded by talking shortly about the clock that is used inside the chip. If you have not read this it may be a good time to jump back and read what I have written so far. I’ll be putting links back at the top of every blog from now on to help.State Machine ‘v’ Micro in a FPGADesigning a FPGA Micro Pt1 - Start The ClockOk so this last week I started writing the VHDL code for my PIC core that I’ll be...
Elliptic Curve Cryptography - Key Exchange and Signatures
Elliptic curve mathematics over finite fields helps solve the problem of exchanging secret keys for encrypted messages as well as proving a specific person signed a particular document. This article goes over simple algorithms for key exchange and digital signature using elliptic curve mathematics. These methods are the essence of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) used in applications such as SSH, TLS and HTTPS.
Elliptic Curve Digital Signatures
A digital signature is used to prove a message is connected to a specific sender. The sender can not deny they sent that message once signed, and no one can modify the message and maintain the signature. The message itself is not necessarily secret. Certificates of authenticity, digital cash, and software distribution use digital signatures so recipients can verify they are getting what they paid for.
Since messages can be of any length and mathematical algorithms always use fixed...
Mastering Modern FPGA Skills for Engineers
In the rapidly evolving tech industry, engineers must acquire proficiency in modern FPGA skills. These skills empower engineers to optimize designs, minimize resource usage, and efficiently address FPGA design challenges while ensuring functionality, security, and compliance.
Three more things you need to know when transitioning from MCUs to FPGAs
Take a look at three more important difference between FPGAs and MCUs: "code reuse" vs templating, metastability and blocking vs. non-blocking operations.
Polynomial Math
Elliptic Curve Cryptography is used as a public key infrastructure to secure credit cards, phones and communications links. All these devices use either FPGA's or embedded microprocessors to compute the algorithms that make the mathematics work. While the math is not hard, it can be confusing the first time you see it. This blog is an introduction to the operations of squaring and computing an inverse over a finite field which are used in computing Elliptic Curve arithmetic. ...
Homebrew CPUs: Color Languages
Color LanguagesHere on bizarro we program using -- get this – text! Our other senses - hearing, touch, smell, are not used at all. Even our visual perception is greatly underutilized - we just use two-dimensional text on a flat display a foot in front of our eyes.
Color is just beginning to be used, although in a lame syntax coloring way only. Granted, it makes it easier to detect stupid syntax errors such as misspelled keywords. Sadly, color carries zero semantic or...
MyHDL ... MyPWM
The PWM topic appears to be popular lately on the fpgarelated site. This is coincidence, but I typically find the topic of modulating and demodulating signals interesting. For digital systems it is always entertaining to play with PWMs. The following PWM RTL description is quite a bit different than the PWM module described by Anton Babushkin. The module presented here is a minimal PWM engine defined at design time (i.e. not run-time).
As...
Are you kidding me?
If I understand the blog entry [1] correctly, it's saying the industry is ready for high level synthesis (HLS), well almost. The blog states, the higher abstraction level will be achieved via C/C++/SystemC (the C-centric flows). A quote from the blog.
... getting close, and one of the biggest hurdles still to overcome is the skill set -- the combination of hardware design expertise and C++ -- ...
C/C++/SystemC, are you kidding...
Cutting a Path Forward
IntroductionAs a newcomer to the community, I thought I would start off by introducing myself, and give a little information about what has drawn me to start working with FPGAs.
My day job is as a professional software developer: Figure out what people want; figure out how to make it happen (if possible); and then wrangle code, databases, networks, and servers into giving the correct responses or actions as necessary.
By night, however, I've been working on my...
