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

Parallel designs

FPGAs, being a blank slate, provide the fabric we can use to construct various applications. People use FPGAs for signal processing applications such as software-defined radio (SDR), high performance computing applications, and, more recently, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

ML and AI and massive parallelism

In recent years, ML and AI have boomed. Self-driving cars, deep fake generation and analysis, and market predictions are but a few of the topics that these applications have been applied to.

It's easy to see why. The Artix part we are targeting has up to 240 DSP blocks. The largest Virtex Ultrascale+ that Xilinx makes has almost 4,000 DSP blocks and 9,000 Logic cells. Xilinx advertises up to 38.3 TOP/s for INT8 operations in the VU13P.

It's beyond the scope of this book to provide an overall introduction, but I would certainly encourage investigating the resources available for parallel designs.

Parallel design...