What do you guys recommend for experimenting with FPGA's? I know very little about hardware design at this point, but with an extensive programming background I should be able to pickup VHDL or Verilog very quickly. As a hobbyist, I'd just be designing toy projects, but perhaps you guys have experience working on bigger projects and can share some ideas.
This, but to be clear it's not everything iCE. It's specifically the iCE40 chipset. It's the only FPGA with a completely FOSS verilog to bitstream toolchain.
Joshua King
Open source hardware? Oy vey!!! How long before that is shut down? T-t-he goyim c-can't build a RISC processor with that can they???
Brayden Ortiz
Software programming and stuff like VHDL and verilog while looking similar, require a different mindeset and approach of designing the code.
Lincoln Smith
I have heard that, but I look forward to learning the different approach. I am a stable genius so it shouldn't be too difficult. It's 'just for fun' too, so there's no time pressure if I do go at a leisurely pace.
William Powell
What?
Wyatt Hall
No one knows more about horses than me, nobody. Horses are great, don't we love horses? You know they have a lot of horses in MONTANA! Anyone from Montana here? Beautiful. You know I won Montana and Idaho in a land slide folks. I like to win. Do we like winners? Like a race horse, you ever see those horses, the ones that just win all the time. I like those horses. And we're going to keep winning like a prized race horse. Big league.
Michael Wilson
Oh.
Easton Martin
Why would someone want an FPGA board rather than a SBC with a low powered processor? I figure the latter will use more power, but I assume the other factor is because an FPGA is a lot cheaper when you manufacture a product?
Connor Martin
Speed and ability to do things in parallel. FPGAs are not running software, they're just a collection of logic blocks and DSP units. When you write your VHDL or verilog description of the circuit, synthetizator figures out how to connect logic blocks together to realize your circuit. You can do things that takes conventonal Von Neumann processor hundreds of cycles in a single cycle on an FPGA.
Nicholas Foster
What are the most common clock rates fpga can hit?
Leo Cooper
I'm curious how the Ethernet and USB ports work on that board. Are there routines you load into the FPGA to get a TCP/IP stack? Also how well can you implement numerical operations on an FPGA? Do you push the work to a FPU, or again load a routine to do it all in the FPGA?
Hunter Richardson
Usual FPGA circuit will use multiple clocks depending on the requirements of the circuit. You can have some part running at 1 Hz and push data to some bus running at 100 MHz. They don't usually go above 1 GHz.
Usually manufacturer provides IP (Intellectual property) cores xilinx.com/products/intellectual-property/ef-di-25gemac.html to handle networking, otherwise you build it using state machines. Most FPGAs use special transciever interfaces to push large amounts of data (>1Tb/s).
There is no FPU on FPGA, you can implement one but you usually just send it to DSP or literary build an adder from logic gates.
Daniel Nelson
Oh lordy. Sounds pricy. $2995
I did see that Xilinx have a free WebPACK version of their ISE software which at least runs in linux, so there is that.
No, you could learn with $15 FPGA from ebay. Problem is that there are no external devices on those boards (buttons, leds, displays, connectors) so you have to wire them yourselves. If you're interested in "programming" (which is really logic circuit design) then it's best to use kits with external devices on board. Also there is opencores.org/projects which you can use in place of IP from big companies. For learning that should be plenty of fun.
Nolan Roberts
(checked) Cheers, the opencores project looks like a useful resource. I'll most certainly look for kits (terasic and diligent seem to good) to make things a bit easier. As for VHDL itself, I see this book is recommended, would you agree?
Henry Adams
Yes, you will also want to have pic related for basics of digital circuits.
Joseph Foster
I have Mano's book which someone gave me a few years ago, but I'll keep this in mind should the other one be useless.
The xilinx micro is so small you can travel with it. Both are tiny as point in fact.
Hope this helps really love my mojo.
Levi Nguyen
Apologies for a dumb question, but what basic output pins do you have on a board like this? I see lots of peripherals but surely you can do basic high/low connections to a broad board, right?
Matthew Cooper
All those connectors on the side (2) are GPIO pins. Pic related for more info.
William Jenkins
Ahhh ok. Now for dumb question #2. Is it necessary to master analog circuit design before digital? I know it's not one or the other, but is there a progression which should be followed?
Michael Williams
No, unless you're planning to design high speed circuits (GHz and beyond) or you're using analog sensors in your project (which are mostly simple circuits to implement unless you're dealing with low noise or high precision devices). Maybe, if you want to do digital audio then you'll probably have to add low-pass filter to the output (PWM sound). For general digital desigh ohm's law is pretty much all you need. You should at least be able to calculate what value resistor for LED you need. In summary, you can start with digital now and pick up analog bits as you go (most of the time you'll just do pure digital things such as: boolean algebra, karnaugh maps, state diagrams, VHDL... nothing to do with analog electronics).
David Flores
Ok that's fine then. I have a good grasp on the fundamentals, but I'd have to learn / review things more complicated than basic op-amp's. In fact I have a very nice book which covers such topics, "The Art of Electronics", which sadly I have not gotten around to completing.
Daniel Campbell
Is circuit design the last tech refuge of the straight white man? Seriously now, it does look like a fun unchartered territory where the poz has not set in.
William Barnes
...
David Lee
Explain your moronic comment.
Josiah Bailey
I have a gameboy advanced how do I mine bitcoin?
Noah Wood
you fucking mong
Alexander Howard
Do you guys recommend getting a board with an integrated processor? As a beginner this seems like overkill, but it does seems to be the trend these boards are going with, and it doesn’t seems to add much to the price.
You can always use a pure FPGA (say Artix 7) and lay out a soft-cpu architecture like MicroBlaze, and run applications with that. It will be slower than the integrated ARM-A9 found in the Zynq-7000 though. There's a lot of hype around the Zynq family at the moment as it does make some problems easier when built as a FPGA/CPU hybrid, especially if you want to transfer existing programming knowledge to your product design. It is also possible to ignore the ARM-A9 and still do something like MicroBlaze, but that would be strange. Perhaps one idea is to buy an entry level FPGA at the beginning and then a higher end Zynq board once you gain experience.
Joshua Wilson
phone wars shitflinging and speccy dick-measuring, but you guys are pretty crap so far. Step up your game, 9gag
Parker Ramirez
What the hell did I just read???
Gabriel Bennett
No. Look at the FPGA videos you find on youtube, nearly all of them are by some variation of Pajeet Vindalutikapopadom. Now on the plus side, these are probably top-tier Brahmin class Indians, which is fine. What you don't want are the lazy low skilled ones who poo all over an enterprise javascript project. What I have noticed, is that the the real annoyance in Holla Forums, the purple haired SJWs, are caught and contained by the Raspberry Pi filters. There's even zynq boards specially designed for Python programming, so even if they dream about advancing, there are plenty of traps preventing them from ruining electrical engineering.
