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

Project 2 – Counting button presses

The project in this chapter will count button presses and display the count in a human-readable form using the seven-segment display.

Introducing the seven-segment display

In the previous chapters, we displayed binary numbers by using the LEDs on the board. You might have wondered why we weren't using the row of unlit 8s. The reason is that there is timing associated with the display that we need registers to accomplish.

Let's take a look at how we light up the seven segments. The following diagram shows which segment is controlled by which cathode:

Figure 3.13 – Seven segment display

Looking at the preceding diagram, we can see there are eight signals that define whether a given LED is lit or not. To compose an image, we simply need to come up with a module that takes in a Binary Coded Decimal (BCD) or hexadecimal number and converts it to a format that the display can handle. We have a...