Book Image

FPGA Programming for Beginners

By : Frank Bruno
5 (1)
Book Image

FPGA Programming for Beginners

5 (1)
By: Frank Bruno

Overview of this book

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have now become a core part of most modern electronic and computer systems. However, to implement your ideas in the real world, you need to get your head around the FPGA architecture, its toolset, and critical design considerations. FPGA Programming for Beginners will help you bring your ideas to life by guiding you through the entire process of programming FPGAs and designing hardware circuits using SystemVerilog. The book will introduce you to the FPGA and Xilinx architectures and show you how to work on your first project, which includes toggling an LED. You’ll then cover SystemVerilog RTL designs and their implementations. Next, you’ll get to grips with using the combinational Boolean logic design and work on several projects, such as creating a calculator and updating it using FPGA resources. Later, the book will take you through the advanced concepts of AXI and show you how to create a keyboard using PS/2. Finally, you’ll be able to consolidate all the projects in the book to create a unified output using a Video Graphics Array (VGA) controller that you’ll design. By the end of this SystemVerilog FPGA book, you’ll have learned how to work with FPGA systems and be able to design hardware circuits and boards using SystemVerilog programming.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction to FPGAs and Xilinx Architectures
3
Section 2: Introduction to Verilog RTL Design, Simulation, and Implementation
9
Section 3: Interfacing with External Components

AXI4 interfaces (full and AXI-Lite)

The AXI4 interface is a full-featured processor interface used by ARM to allow the easy connection of peripherals to their processors. Xilinx has adopted this interface to connect its hard and soft processors to other cores, whether AXI-Lite, full, or streaming. Because it is full-featured, it can be costly to implement and should really only be considered when you need an addressable interface with high-performance bursting capability. There are five components to an AXI full or AXI-Lite interface. Reads consist of an address component and data component:

Figure 7.24 – AXI read channel

The preceding figure conceptually shows how a read operation in AXI occurs. An address and a control bus signal the slave to perform a read. In an AXI-Lite interface, this is a single location; in a full interface, it can be for a burst of data. These types of reads are posted reads, meaning that if the interface supports it, multiple...