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. … Read more
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. … Read more
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, … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
Alex connected up an salvaged laptop LCD to his Papilio Plus FPGA development board. He is designing a pair of boards for easier interface, one is designed as a wing for the dev board, and the other as a breakout … Read more
Chris wrote extensive documentation on how to implement precise control of DC motors using FPGAs. The goal of this project is to build a simple one input, one output system that will control a motor. The control input will come … Read more
Lattice Semi is offering the iCEblink40 Evaluation Kits for $19 for a limited time. The iCEblink40 boards feature the ultra low density iCE40 FPGA and come in two versions, the iCEblink40-HX1K and the iCEblink40-LP1K Evaluation Kits which differ in the … Read more
Michael Fischer of emb4fun has a new tutorial on using Nut/OS on Altera FPGAs. His design uses the Altera DE0-Nano board and a self-made adapter equipped with a DM9000E-H board, and includes a short example for an Internet Radio. Michael’s … Read more
Magnusk designed the Pipistello Spartan 6 development board with the same IO headers as the Papilio One. It features 64MB of RAM running at 200Mhz, the FDTI FT2232H High Speed USB IC, HDMI output, and a micro-SD card holder. So … Read more
Ultra-Embedded designed a soft core 32bit openRISC CPU with basic ISA functionality for small FPGAs. It fits on the Spartan 3 featured on the Papilio One 250k development board, and comes in pipelined and multi-cycle versions. AltOR32 is an OpenRISC … Read more
Newark/element14 and David Pellerin, co-founder of Impulse Accelerated Technologies, have teamed up to offer a free webinar on programming in C code on an FPGA using the Altera Cyclone development platform. They promise, “In 45 minutes you will learn how … Read more
ZPUino is a system-on-chip 32bit microprocessor FPGA core, that functions with a modified Arduino IDE. All the files regarding the core are open-source and downloadable from their site, and so is the modified Arduino IDE. Yes, that is true. ZPUino … Read more
Here’s a site we found containing open source simulation models for system level verification of CPLD/FPGA devices. “Founded in 1995, Free Model Foundry (FMF) is dedicated to promoting standard modeling practices within the electrical engineering comunity. In particular, we support … Read more
Squok writes referring us to several documents he’s found regarding hacking the bitstream in secure FPGAs: In order to protect the intellectual property and to prevent fraud, e.g., by cloning an FPGA or manipulating its content, many current FPGAs employ … Read more
In a previous post we wrote about Kiran’s review of Altera’s SignalTapII logic analyzer simulator for FPGAs. Jason let us know that Altera provides many free online courses for their tools, and one of them is for the SignalTapII. The … Read more
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