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Gene Breniman (@genebren)

Gene Breniman has over 30 years experience in design and development of hardware and software for embedded systems. He has worked in a variety of fields, including avionics, life sciences and automatic test equipment engineering.

VHDL tutorial - A practical example - part 3 - VHDL testbench

Gene Breniman June 25, 20118 comments

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...


VHDL tutorial - A practical example - part 2 - VHDL coding

Gene Breniman May 27, 2011

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...


VHDL tutorial - A practical example - part 1 - Hardware

Gene Breniman May 18, 20111 comment

In previous posts I described some simple VHDL examples.  This time let's try something a little more complex. This is part one of a multiple part article.  This is intended to be a detailed description of one of several initial designs that I developed for a client.  This design never made it into a product, but a similar design was used and is currently being produced.  As a considerable amount of work was put into this effort, I decided to share this design...


VHDL tutorial - Creating a hierarchical design

Gene Breniman May 22, 20086 comments

In earlier blog entries I introduced some of the basic VHDL concepts. First, developing a function ('VHDL tutorial') and later verifying and refining it ('VHDL tutorial - part 2 - Testbench' and 'VHDL tutorial - combining clocked and sequential logic'). In this entry I will describe how to...


VHDL tutorial - combining clocked and sequential logic

Gene Breniman March 3, 2008

In an earlier article on VHDL programming ("VHDL tutorial" and "VHDL tutorial - part 2 - Testbench", I described a design for providing a programmable clock divider for a ADC sequencer. In this example, I showed how to generate a clock signal (ADCClk), that was to be programmable over a series of fixed rates (20MHz, 10MHz, 4MHz, 2MHz, 1MHz and 400KHz), given a master clock rate of 40MHz. A reader of that article had written to ask if it was possible to extend the design to...


VHDL tutorial - part 2 - Testbench

Gene Breniman October 30, 20073 comments

In an earlier article I walked through the VHDL coding of a simple design. In this article I will continue the process and create a test bench module to test the earlier design. The Xilinx ISE environment makes it pretty easy to start the testing process. To start the process, select "New Source" from the menu items under "Project". This launches the "New Source Wizard". From within the Wizard select "VHDL Test Bench" and enter the name of the new module (click 'Next' to...


VHDL tutorial

Gene Breniman October 4, 20079 comments

When I was first introduced to "Programmable Logic" several years ago, it was an answer to many of the challenges that I was struggling with. Though the parts were primitive by today's standards (simple PALs verses FPGA), they were an extremely cost effective tool addressing the need for specialized logic blocks.

I have continued to incorporate these powerful blocks into many of my latest designs. My current favorite part line is the Xilinx CoolRunner series (XC2Cxxx). In this...


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