Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

MicroFPGA – A coming revolution in small electronics (2019) [video]

youtube.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 57 posts

Re: MicroFPGA – A coming revolution in small electronics (2019) [video]

#41

Post by IQunder130 »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #39
FPGAhacker wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I think "programming" RTL is dead simple. It's so simple, in fact, that it's not even interesting. But I've been doing it forever so my perspective is skewed.

I think you are thinking of different types of tasks. A lot of RTL is brainless, but if you are actually trying to compute with it, it can get tough. A mediocre C++ programmer can write a (bad) hash table in C++ in a few hours. How fast can you give me one in Verilog?

You're not writing a hash table in verilog, you're writing a hardware configuration that can hold and manipulate a hash table. It's a different ball game.

Re: MicroFPGA – A coming revolution in small electronics (2019) [video]

#42

Post by analog31 »

snvzz wrote: post #35
analog31 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't gotten very far yet but TinyFpga BX was easy to get set up and running "LED blink" which is the hardware version of hello world. I've used microcontrollers since forever and want to expand my options.

I have one of these and love it, but unfortunately the tinyfpga team is MIA and getting the boards has been hard to impossible for a long time now.

Aha, that explains why the two spares that I ordered have been on back order.

Re: MicroFPGA – A coming revolution in small electronics (2019) [video]

#44

Post by ccosm »

Barring some exponential increase in the usability of FPGA tools, I think the mainstreaming of these technologies will forever remain just around the corner.

More coarse-grained architectures like GPUs or reduced-scope architectures with a less intense cognitive load like the programmable IOs found in Raspberry Pi Picos or some Texas Instruments MCUs seem like a much more feasible solution for the vast majority of potential FPGA use-cases a tinkerer would run into.

Re: MicroFPGA – A coming revolution in small electronics (2019) [video]

#45

Post by exikyut »

swiley wrote: post #37
pclmulqdq wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FPGA evangelists like this really need a reality check. Programming in RTL is not easy, and it's not really a skill that most people need, so it doesn't make a lot of sense as an educational tool. The "killer app" for hobbyist FPGAs might be some sort of "SoC builder" tool that lets you build a specific microcontroller around a few high-performance cores, and then program it like software. But don't worry. Since 2000…

Meh. HDL isn't that hard and there are good books on it. The main reason FPGA programming is unpopular is because the tools are pretty hideous. Icestorm makes things a lot better but it supports like 5 parts and they're not very powerful ones.

How cheap are the devkits, can I easily source - Fundamental questions I imagine a semi-interested tinkerer would be asking

Re: MicroFPGA – A coming revolution in small electronics (2019) [video]

#46

Post by haberman »

metaphor wrote: post #9

This talk struck me as conflicting in a sort of have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too kind of way. The wrinkles part[1] summarizes a lot of what this individual is advocating. Paraphrasing (with equivalent liberal handwaving of details as the talk does): I want to write FPGA code like any other high-level programming language ( but quickly dismiss that the hard part of developing native HDL is in fact that it's fundamentally…

What constrains PMod to low-frequency applications with sloppy SI? What inherently limits the frequency?

I have been dabbling in FPGA programming on a Xilinx Nexys A7. Through some PMod ports, I've managed to drive the shift registers on an LED matrix display at 20MHz. Is this considered high frequency?

My oscilloscope shows that the signal is somewhat messy at this frequency. But the data sheet for the shift register suggests that the thresholds are 0.7xVcc and 0.3xVcc for high and low, so it seems to be good enough. Is this shift register unusually accepting of sloppy SI?

I'm not understanding how a PMod port would constrain the usable frequency. If my clock is going at 100MHz inside the FPGA, what prevents signals of this frequency being sent through PMod wires? Is a PMod port different than the normal I/O pins offered on a board like TinyFPGA?

Re: MicroFPGA – A coming revolution in small electronics (2019) [video]

#47

Post by detaro »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #11
metaphor wrote: post #9

This talk struck me as conflicting in a sort of have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too kind of way. The wrinkles part[1] summarizes a lot of what this individual is advocating. Paraphrasing (with equivalent liberal handwaving of details as the talk does): I want to write FPGA code like any other high-level programming language ( but quickly dismiss that the hard part of developing native HDL is in fact that it's fundamentally…

FPGA evangelists like this really need a reality check. Programming in RTL is not easy, and it's not really a skill that most people need, so it doesn't make a lot of sense as an educational tool. The "killer app" for hobbyist FPGAs might be some sort of "SoC builder" tool that lets you build a specific microcontroller around a few high-performance cores, and then program it like software. But don't worry. Since 2000…

Accessibility of FPGAs has made massive strides since 2000. You can nowadays get people build a really basic FPGA demo in an hour, starting with a dev board and their unprepared laptop, and even I remember times where you'd struggle to get the tooling installed in that time.

(Not going to go into "mainstream", because that's a) incredibly vague (is microcontroller programming "mainstream"?) and b) IMHO not that interesting - it's fine for specialist things to be accessible but not mainstream)

Re: MicroFPGA – A coming revolution in small electronics (2019) [video]

#48

Post by swiley »

exikyut wrote: post #45
swiley wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh. HDL isn't that hard and there are good books on it. The main reason FPGA programming is unpopular is because the tools are pretty hideous. Icestorm makes things a lot better but it supports like 5 parts and they're not very powerful ones.

How cheap are the devkits, can I easily source - Fundamental questions I imagine a semi-interested tinkerer would be asking

devkits compatible with icestorm? I have an icestick that I've messed with, at 1x it costs $20 (at least when I bought it off amazon.)

Re: MicroFPGA – A coming revolution in small electronics (2019) [video]

#49

Post by detaro »

xfer wrote: post #17
pclmulqdq wrote: post #4

As a (former) FPGA developer, this revolution has been coming for a while, and I'm still waiting. Unfortunately, the programming model actually makes things really difficult for people who think in a software frame of mind. High-level synthesis gets part of the way, but not for low-level peripherals. PMODs are good for university/hobby projects with FPGAs, though, and I'm glad the bar is getting lower and lower. FPGA…

Not to mention the tools are shit and synthesis takes a long time. If you thought c++ compilers are slow just try using fpga tools.

Give the open-source toolchains a go some time. Yes, they only cover some FPGA models and can't make use of all the features, but the dev workflow is sooo much nicer. And they are constantly improving.
Post reply on HN