Russell is interested in working with FPGAs. He’s developed an educational website: www.nandland.com. “It’s an educational website for people interested in learning about FPGAs and ASICs, mostly by focusing on VHDL and Verilog tutorials and examples. I have written all of the content on it myself and I’m adding new content constantly.” Check it out! […]
Category Archives: FPGA
FPGA based PlayStation portable display driver
Kalle Hyvönen has designed a FPGA-based display driver for driving PlayStation Portable displays: This is a project I made quite a while back (about 7 months ago). I wanted a bigger display for a project of mine and noticed that PlayStation Portable displays (480×272 pixels) are quite cheap on eBay but they do not have […]
Bus Pirate clone on FPGA
Rob informs us that he’s made a Bus Pirate clone entirely from a FPGA (with custom soft processor, USB device RTL + SW). The design is based on the Xilinx Spartan XC6SLX9. “The whole thing is basically hosted on the FPGA, with just a SPI Flash, USB PHY and LDOs!” You can check out the […]
VGA framegrabbing with TVP7002
desaster blogged about his VGA framegrabber project: The project got a nice boost when I found TVP7002 on TI’s site. It’s a video digitizing chip, featuring 3x ADC (one for each color channel) and a PLL system for generating the pixel clock from the HSYNC input. Compared to alternatives, this seemed to be quite nicely priced, and […]
30C3 video: Programming FPGAs with PSHDL
In this presentation from the recent Chaos Communications Congress conference in Hamburg, Germany, Karsten Becker highlighted the Plain Simple Hardware Description Language (PSHDL) programming language for FPGAs. PSHDL is a new language that purports to have a much better syntax similar to C, making it easier for developers to learn. If you’ve tried to learn […]
CCC Video: Extracting keys from FPGAs, OTP tokens and door locks
This presentation on extracting keys from FPGAs, OTP Tokens and door locks is from the recent Chaos Communications Conference (CCC) in Hamburg, Germany. In it David briefly introduces implementation attacks and side-channel analysis (SCA) in particular, along with related methods to bypass security mechanisms and extract secret keys. “The main focus is on three case […]
30C3 Video: FPGA 101 – Making awesome stuff with FPGAs
This presentation by Karsten Becker was given at this week’s 30C3 Chaos Communications Congress (CCC) conference in Hamburg, Germany. In this talk I want to show you around in the mysterious world of Field Programmable Gate Arrays, or short FPGAs. The aim is to enable you to get a rough understanding on what FPGAs are […]
Propeller II: Emulation of the P2 on DE0-NANO & DE2-115 FPGA boards
The Propeller 2 is Parallax’s next gen release of the popular Propeller multi-core MCU. The Parallax Forum has a thread discussing emulation of the P2 on DE0-NANO & DE2-115 FPGA boards. The latest code (FPGA, pnut.exe, documents) are all in one zip with info on this post in the Parallax forum.
Lattice debuts iCEstick FPGA Evaluation Board at $24.99
Lattice Semi has released their iCEstick eval board. This board has a high-performance, low-power iCE40HX1K FPGA on board and has a USB thumb drive form factor. IO connectors include 16 LVCMOS/LVTTL (3.3 V) digital I/O connections on 0.1” through-hole connections and a 2 x 6 position Digilent Pmod connector for other peripheral connections. The board’s […]
Altera’s free online technical training courses
Altera is making available a group of free online technical training courses covering the various aspects of FPGA design. Topics include the basics of programmable logic design, Verilog and VHDL basics, as well as introductory and advanced courses on the Quartus II IDE. You can check out the course listings at the Altera online training […]
Hand-tracking Anti Tetris game on DE2 board
Tian Gao from Cornell’s University’s EE program developed what he calls an AntiTetris game using the Altera DE2 FPGA board. The project was part of the final requirements in Cornell’s ECE 5760 Advanced Microcontroller Design and system-on-chip Spring 2013 course. “In this project, I built a video game “Anti Tetris” on Altera DE2 board. The […]
miniSpartan6, another Spartan 6 Kit
The Hardwarer has designed and built this open source FPGA starter kit -miniSpartan6, it is based on Papilio Pro and XuLA2: It is designed around Spartan 6 chip from Xilinx and it has on board JTAG programmer based on FT2232D from FTDI. The miniSpartan6 is built to combine the advantages of both Papilio Pro and XuLA2. It […]
Zylin tiny open source CPU on FPGA
If you’re interested in experimenting with a tiny CPU implemented in an FPGA, we found this interesting article on using the Zylin Tiny CPU. AMR wanted a really small CPU core to handle things like loading ROMs from SD card. It had to take up a minimal number of logic elements and be easy to […]
Chip Hack FPGA event set for London April 20-21, 2013
Hardware freedom day is coming up and Embecosm is arranging a workshop around FPGA and OpenRISC in London. The event is scheduled for Saturday 20th & Sunday 21st April 2013 at The Centre for Creative Collaboration, 16 Acton Street, London, WC1X 9NG. Chip Hack is a two day workshop that provides an introduction to programming […]
Cornell online courses: Designing with Microcontrollers and FPGAs
Bruce Land writes: I teach two courses at Cornell University in Electrical and computer engineering. Recently I have uploaded a full set of lectures for each course to YouTubeEDU. The lectures have comments which link to lab exercises and other supporting Materials. There is a general YouTube channel for these courses. Here are the links […]
Homebrew Cray-1A on Xilinx Spartan-3E board
Chris Fenton has spent the last year and a half or so constructing his own 1/10-scale, binary-compatible, cycle-accurate Cray-1. He says this project falls purely into the “because I can!” category.” The actual design was implemented in a Xilinx Spartan-3E 1600 development board. For vintage computing enthusiasts, Chris also provides an interesting link to the […]
Lattice sub-$30 PLD dev boards
Lattice Semiconductor is once again offering several PLD dev boards for under $30 each. The available boards feature the MachXO2, MachXO 2280, ispMACH 4256ZE and the POWR1014. Each Breakout Board is a 3” x 3” form factor and features GPIO breakout headers, USB B-mini connector for power and programming, an LED array, and prototype area. […]
VHDL tutorial using Xilinx CPLD
We’re always looking for good information on programmable logic devices, projects and tutorials. In our quest we discovered this tutorial on VHDL programming by the crew from StartingElectronics. The course is geared toward beginneers and provides a good introduction to the VHDL language through a series of tutorials that demonstrate the use of VHDL running […]
Emulating an LCD controller with a Papailio
Alex received a monochrome 256×128 LCD with a missing controller chip. The board features 8 Hitachi LCD drivers, but without the controller you have to drive the display by constantly sending data to refresh the picture. After some research he stumbled onto the Hitachi LCD controller driver LSI data book, which gave him enough info […]
Pipistrello v2.0 Eagle design files
Magnus Karlsson informs us that he has just released the Eagle design files for Pipistrello v2.0. Pipistrello is a FPGA development board for Xilinx Spartan-6 parts in 324 BGA package, desiged by Saanlima Electronics. The filess are available from the Saanlima website. Via the contact form.