FPGARelated.com

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...


Introduction to FPGA Technology

Muhammad Yasir May 12, 2011
Overview

FPGA stands for Field Programmable Gate Array. An FPGA is an integrated circuit (IC) that can be programmed and configured by the embedded system developer in the field after it has been manufactured. FPGA is a semi-conductor device which is not limited to any pre-defined hardware function; it is rather highly flexible in its functionality and may be configured by the embedded system developer according to his design requirements. FPGAs use pre-built logic blocks and programmable...


FPGA Bloggers Needed - New Reward System

Stephane Boucher April 11, 20112 comments

Are you an FPGA expert? If you are an have an interest in sharing your knowledge with the FPGA community, you might be interested in the new reward system for bloggers (see the blogs section here).

The rewards will be based on page impressions, meaning that the more traffic a blog post will get, the faster it will generate rewards for the author.

Basically, a given blog post will generate $25 to the author for every 250 unique pageviews, up to a maximum total reward of $500 per blog post...


USB-FPGA : Introduction

Christopher Felton January 12, 20111 comment

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)...


Half-band filter on Xilinx FPGA

Lyons Zhang November 30, 20105 comments
1. DSP48 Slice in Xilinx FPGA

There are many DSP48 Slices in most Xilinx® FPGAs, one DSP48 slice in Spartan6® FPGA is shown in Figure 1, the structure may different depending on the device, but broadly similar.

Figure 1: A whole DSP48A1 Slice in Spartan6 (www.xilinx.com)

2. Symmetric Systolic Half-band FIR

Figure 2: Symmetric Systolic Half-band FIR Filter

3. Two-channel Symmetric Systolic Half-band FIR

  Figure 3: 2-Channel...


A Bit Bucket had Holes

Christopher Felton July 28, 20101 comment

Couple months ago I wrote a quick little blog about a company called Tabula.  Tabula has a virtual 3D approach to achieving higher logic density in an FPGA.  See the previous blog for more information.

Along similar lines was another company called TierLogic which actually had multiple physical layers.  I was impressed with the Tabula approach and claims.  Along the same lines the TierLogic technology looked promising as well.  But, EE Times has reported that...


Developing FPGA-DSP IP with Python

Christopher Felton March 16, 20101 comment

This blog post was previously titled MyHDL ASIC Proven (How is this related to FPGAs?) but the blog post has been updated and mainly discusses developing FPGA-DSP IP with Python / MyHDL. The original content is still present but the post has been reorganized and expanded. Original post 16-Mar-2010.

Developing FPGA-DSP IP with Python / MyHDL

Using Python to develop DSP logic for an FPGA is very powerful. The Python ecosystem contains many packages including numerical and...


Holy Bit Bucket

Christopher Felton March 3, 2010

Was my first response after reading some of the recent news on Tabula.  If you Google "Tabula FPGA" you will find a link to the company and a bunch of recent articles.  The company appears to be building buzz (hmmm, wonder if they have facebook and twitter accounts) about their technology and future products.  

There has been some discussions (comp.arch.fpga) and a bunch of small articles about the relatively new FPGA company. The company is trying to increase...


The Spartans

Christopher Felton February 20, 20104 comments

The latest release of the Xilinx Spartan family is the Spartan6 line of FPGAs. It has been awhile since the last major Spartan released, the Spartan3, but this last year Xilinx released the Spartan6. The Xilinx Spartan family is the low cost FPGAs compared to the higher cost and high performance Virtex family. The Spartan family is derived from the Virtex architecture with some changes to reduce the cost. The Spartan3 FPGAs were derived from the Virtex-II architecture. Since the Spartan3...


New Design - Finally!

Stephane Boucher April 29, 20093 comments

For those of you who are familiar with my work, you already know that FPGARelated.com is not the only engineering web site that I publish. I also publish DSPRelated.com and EmbeddedRelated.com. Those two web sites have been on a new design for quite some time now and porting the new design to FPGARelated.com has been on my todo list for too long!  I am glad today to announce that I have finally found the time to apply the more modern design to FPGARelated.com.

Thank you...


Tool install for examples

Christopher Felton August 2, 20132 comments

Most of my examples on fpgarelated use MyHDL for the hardware description and another Python package myhdl_tools rhea.build to control the FPGA vendor's software. This means everything is controlled and run from the Python environment.

Install the following to compile the posted examples:

MyHDL package : pip myhdl or myhdl github myhdl_tools : myhdl_tools bitbucket rhea...

Choosing an Implementation Approach

David Days May 10, 2018
What one man can do, another can do!--The Edge (1997) Choose the hill you want to die on.--Common saying attributed to the United States Marine Corps Planning out an FPGA Implementation

In my first article, I gave a high-level view of the project that brings me into the world of FPGA development. At the end, I tried to break down the areas of development that would be involved, and some of the knowledge and expertise I would probably have to gain in order to make it a...


Elliptic Curve Cryptography - Security Considerations

Mike October 16, 2023

The security of elliptic curve cryptography is determined by the elliptic curve discrete log problem. This article explains what that means. A comparison with real number logarithm and modular arithmetic gives context for why it is called a log problem.


New book on Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Mike August 30, 20234 comments

New book on Elliptic Curve Cryptography now online. Deep discount for early purchase. Will really appreciate comments on how to improve the book because physical printing won't happen for a few more months. Check it out here: http://mng.bz/D9NA


Summer of gateware is coming (again)

Christopher Felton April 29, 20162 comments

How time flies!  I swear my last post was a summary of the 2015 summer of gateware.  This year (2016) MyHDL is participating in the Google summer of code again, for the second year, continuing as a sub-org of the Python Software Foundation organization.

This year, so far, has been amazing and inspiring.  We have had many talented students inquire about the project and contribute to myhdl and


Point of View

Christopher Felton August 28, 20146 comments

I was caught of guard when someone commented:

"when a FIR filter is full of multiple loops and complex code, something is wrong"

The comment was made during an informal discussion on alternative hardware description languages (HDL) and was targeted to the straightforward FIR filter implemented in MyHDL

(different FIR description simulation results) 

Personally, (and...


Grandiose Delusions

Christopher Felton May 3, 2012

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...


[Comments] C HLS Benefits

Christopher Felton April 11, 20142 comments

Earlier this week I posted a small write-up comparing a hardware median calculation implemented in a C-to gates "HLS" (Vivado C HLS) and a version in MyHDL.  For a long time I have had the belief that C-to-gate technologies are of little to no benefit - based on the simple premise that "C" is not that high-level of a language (I actually consider it lower than Verilog and VHDL ... but that is a conversation for another time).

Language comparisons...


What do Ohio, Python, and FPGAs have in common?

Christopher Felton July 23, 2013

Anyone in the Columbus Ohio area in the United States this upcoming weekend (7/27 and 7/28) should stop by the @pyohio conference.  This is a *FREE* regional python conference.  I will be giving a talk at the end of the day Sunday, discussing MyHDL, FPGAs, and a hands-on workshop following the presentation.

The talk will focus on introducing programmable hardware to "imperative thinkers".  Anyone curious about FPGAs, Python, or familiar with FPGAs or embedded...


Summer of Gateware

Christopher Felton September 18, 2015

This (last) summer the MyHDL project participated in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) as a sub-organization under the Python Software Foundation (PSF). This was our first year participating - there was a lot for us to learn.  Overall it was a worthwhile and beneficial activity.

Being a first time sub-org we were limited to a maximum of two students.  We had nine students apply and twelve mentors volunteer.  Only being able to select two students...