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Renesas introduces sub 50 cents FPGA family with Yosys-based development tools

cnx-software.com

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Re: Renesas introduces sub 50 cents FPGA family with Yosys-based development tools

#11

Post by milesvp »

sneak wrote: post #3

Slightly offtopic, but perhaps someone here can shed some light: What are the best hobbyist use cases for FPGAs? Most of the stuff I do can be accomplished with microcontrollers or embedded systems like RPi, I imagine FPGAs become more important when you're doing things like DSP or hard realtime requirements, which don't come up super often in hobbyist projects. I'd like to do more hobby projects involving FPGAs so w…

The single most popular hobby use case may be the Mister project for near perfect, super low latency retro gaming emulation.

Another common use case is real time video stream manipulation. There is a demo by Bunnie Huang who uses an fpga to intercept, decode, then reencode HDMI video streams (including microsecond timing manipulation of one of the data lines) in order to do video overlays on the video (for things like captions).

In general the main use cases are really for things that require lots of parallel and/or low latency processing.

Re: Renesas introduces sub 50 cents FPGA family with Yosys-based development tools

#12

Post by joshspankit »

sneak wrote: post #3

Slightly offtopic, but perhaps someone here can shed some light: What are the best hobbyist use cases for FPGAs? Most of the stuff I do can be accomplished with microcontrollers or embedded systems like RPi, I imagine FPGAs become more important when you're doing things like DSP or hard realtime requirements, which don't come up super often in hobbyist projects. I'd like to do more hobby projects involving FPGAs so w…

After seeing some of the FPGA uses in research papers, I have no idea what the best uses are but I feel like we might on the edge of a revolution if enough people can get moderately powerful FPGAs on a $5 board.

Re: Renesas introduces sub 50 cents FPGA family with Yosys-based development tools

#13

Post by jareklupinski »

milesvp wrote: post #11
sneak wrote: post #3

Slightly offtopic, but perhaps someone here can shed some light: What are the best hobbyist use cases for FPGAs? Most of the stuff I do can be accomplished with microcontrollers or embedded systems like RPi, I imagine FPGAs become more important when you're doing things like DSP or hard realtime requirements, which don't come up super often in hobbyist projects. I'd like to do more hobby projects involving FPGAs so w…

The single most popular hobby use case may be the Mister project for near perfect, super low latency retro gaming emulation. Another common use case is real time video stream manipulation. There is a demo by Bunnie Huang who uses an fpga to intercept, decode, then reencode HDMI video streams (including microsecond timing manipulation of one of the data lines) in order to do video overlays on the video (for things lik…

this for me, just bought the kit needed to help out on the PSX core https://github.com/RobertPeip/PlayStation_MiSTer

Re: Renesas introduces sub 50 cents FPGA family with Yosys-based development tools

#14

Post by mithro »

sneak wrote: post #3

Slightly offtopic, but perhaps someone here can shed some light: What are the best hobbyist use cases for FPGAs? Most of the stuff I do can be accomplished with microcontrollers or embedded systems like RPi, I imagine FPGAs become more important when you're doing things like DSP or hard realtime requirements, which don't come up super often in hobbyist projects. I'd like to do more hobby projects involving FPGAs so w…

If you are motivated by learning rather than practical usage, FPGAs are a great way to learn more about how things like CPUs or peripherals can be designed. It is also a way to understand how to evolve hardware and software at the same time.

Two examples that I have been loosely involved with; * Google's CFU playground which is all about profiling and adding small number of new OpCodes to build an accelerator for a specific ML model (http://cfu-playground.rtfd.io/). * The Fomu workshop (https://workshop.fomu.im) which walks though treating an FPGA like an embedded MCU where you can then modify the MCU!

Re: Renesas introduces sub 50 cents FPGA family with Yosys-based development tools

#15

Post by mithro »

sneak wrote: post #3

Slightly offtopic, but perhaps someone here can shed some light: What are the best hobbyist use cases for FPGAs? Most of the stuff I do can be accomplished with microcontrollers or embedded systems like RPi, I imagine FPGAs become more important when you're doing things like DSP or hard realtime requirements, which don't come up super often in hobbyist projects. I'd like to do more hobby projects involving FPGAs so w…

Project F (https://projectf.io/posts/fpga-graphics/) has a lot of cool examples with visually interesting output.
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