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

What is a sequential element?

We looked at the latch in Chapter 1, Introduction to FPGA Architectures and Xilinx Vivado, and we saw that it's not something we really want to be using. What FPGA designers use to store information is a register, or flip flop. Before we create our first flip flop, we need a quick introduction to clocks.

Clocking your design

In the realm of digital logic, we usually need at least one source of timing in our design and often several. We call this source of timing a clock, which is usually generated by an external crystal oscillator that vibrates at a certain frequency and generates a string of 0s and 1s in our design. Sometimes we'll use the clock input directly, but if we need a specific frequency faster or slower than our input, we have other options such as Phase Locked Loops (PLLs) and Mixed Mode Clock Managers (MMCMs), which we'll discuss in Chapter 5, FPGA Resources and How to Use Them.

When we draw timing diagrams, we typically...