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

Chapter 6: Math, Parallelism, and Pipelined Design

Microprocessors are custom designed ASICs that can have very high performance when running at very high frequencies – up to 5 Ghz as of writing this book. These processors are general-purpose, meaning they need to balance their operations for a wide variety of tasks. In contrast, the Artix 7 we are targeting can hit speeds of up to 300-400 Mhz. Higher-end FPGAs can hit speeds of up to 800 Mhz. Unlike microprocessors, FPGAs can be targeted for a specific application. Because of this, we can utilize design techniques such as parallelism; that is, replicating logic in order to perform more tasks for a given clock cycle than a microprocessor can. We can also use pipelining to achieve a high throughput.

In this chapter, we will look deeper at fixed-point numbers with regards to our temperature sensor. We'll also look at floating-point numbers and see why we might want to use one over the other. Then, we'll look at the...