41–50 of 56 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have a look on OpenCores - http://opencores.org/
I hear the OpenCores website is nearly unmaintained. Someone went and made a github clone of all the code: https://github.com/freecores
The article appears a little outdated because I bought this board last year as a student for $69.
http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?Prod=BASYS2&N...
I strongly recommend Cypress PSoC3 and PSoC5 if your budget is tight and you want to achieve the blazing fast speed of FPGA within a tight budget. I implemented Wavelet Transform with de-noising scheme, a classifier model to match against that Wavelet Transform, and a RMS machine, all in hardware, all in that small PSoC3 chip. Magic.
http://hackaday.com/2014/06/16/cypress-launches-5-arm-dev-bo...
Tragically -- as is the case with FPGAs -- the development environment only runs on Windows.
I really think these companies are missing out on a large market segment of software developers who are increasingly interested in hardware, but who work exclusively on Linux or OSX.
I fear that this article misses out on one of the most important aspects of cheap FPGA boards, which is the software stack. Do not be fooled. There is no freeware, open-source, GNU, LLVM etc software in the FPGA world. You will need to use the manufacturers very own, proprietary, place & route (and often synthesis too) software. For this reason, go with Xilinx or Altera who both offer free versions of their developme…
I fear that this article misses out on one of the most important aspects of cheap FPGA boards, which is the software stack. Do not be fooled. There is no freeware, open-source, GNU, LLVM etc software in the FPGA world. You will need to use the manufacturers very own, proprietary, place & route (and often synthesis too) software. For this reason, go with Xilinx or Altera who both offer free versions of their developme…
Also Altera and Xilinx (I think) provides a free version of Mentor Graphics simulation tool ModelSim that supports up to moderate size designs.
I got interested in FPGAs a few years ago out of a desire to design a toy processor for a Coursera class. I had a similar issue figuring out what board(s) to get, mostly because I didn't know what the number of gates could actually implement. I too ended up with an Atlys board, which is an impressive little beast. When it came to learning an HDL, I got in contact with several people who worked on FPGAs and learned th…
What Coursera class did you take that implement toy processor?
I got interested in FPGAs a few years ago out of a desire to design a toy processor for a Coursera class. I had a similar issue figuring out what board(s) to get, mostly because I didn't know what the number of gates could actually implement. I too ended up with an Atlys board, which is an impressive little beast. When it came to learning an HDL, I got in contact with several people who worked on FPGAs and learned th…
> Do note that this project does not synthesize or route for chips, only load the bit files onto the chips. Other work is being done on that. The only project I'm aware of that has made progress on reverse engineering the Xilinx bitstream is fpgatools: https://github.com/Wolfgang-Spraul/fpgatools It only works with a Spartan-6 LX9, and then only has partial support (e.g. no block RAM). I'd be interested in hearing ab…
I got interested in FPGAs a few years ago out of a desire to design a toy processor for a Coursera class. I had a similar issue figuring out what board(s) to get, mostly because I didn't know what the number of gates could actually implement. I too ended up with an Atlys board, which is an impressive little beast. When it came to learning an HDL, I got in contact with several people who worked on FPGAs and learned th…
Usually most people just cave and use Windows, on which ISE works a bit better.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do note that this project does not synthesize or route for chips, only load the bit files onto the chips. Other work is being done on that. The only project I'm aware of that has made progress on reverse engineering the Xilinx bitstream is fpgatools: https://github.com/Wolfgang-Spraul/fpgatools It only works with a Spartan-6 LX9, and then only has partial support (e.g. no block RAM). I'd be interested in hearing ab…
A few friends are working on making a generic tool that will support lots of different architectures, but since Xilinx has a clause in their agreement for downloading ISE that you will not reverse engineer the software, and that you will not use the output of the software (the bit files for example) to reverse engineer anything. This means that you can't compile a bunch of slightly different things in ISE and check w…