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How FPGAs work, and why you'll buy one (2013)

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Re: How FPGAs work, and why you'll buy one (2013)

#71

Post by chillingeffect »

jonaldomo wrote: post #11

I think FPGAs are an untapped technology. I would love a book by Manning or Pragmatic called "FPGAs in Action" or "101 FPGA Projects". I have no idea what to do with it besides try to make a bitcoin miner.

Seek and ye shall find :)

(1) http://www.fpga4fun.com/ "FPGA projects: 25 projects to build using an FPGA board."

(2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Er9luiBa32k "FPGA 101 - Making awesome stuff with FPGAs [30c3]"

(3) http://hamsterworks.co.nz/mediawiki/index.php/FPGA_course "I want to help hackers take the plunge, purchase an FPGA development board and get their first projects up and running."

(3b) http://hamsterworks.co.nz/mediawiki/index.php/FPGA_Projects

(4) http://www.nandland.com/articles/fpga-101-fpgas-for-beginner... "The following pages give a quick overview of the basics of FPGA design. Read these tutorials to give yourself a solid foundation on your journey into the wonderful world of Digital Design. "

Re: How FPGAs work, and why you'll buy one (2013)

#72

Post by sklogic »

fit2rule wrote: post #69
sklogic wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow! How did I managed not to know of this project?!?

Maybe you also don't know about this project? http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/ They had some interesting progress lately: http://hackaday.com/2015/03/29/reverse-engineering-lattices-...

Yep, did not hear of this one too. I'm more interested in the Xilinx chips at the moment, but may take a look at the Lattice stuff later.

Re: How FPGAs work, and why you'll buy one (2013)

#73

Post by davexunit »

catern wrote: post #64

What I'm having trouble understanding (as just a regular, not-hardcore programmer) is this: What end-user advantage will cause people to buy devices that include FPGAs? What use are they to a consumer? What interesting programs or devices can be created with an FPGA that can't be done otherwise? Basically, if "everyone can easily create whatever custom objects they need!" is the utopian vision for 3D printers, and "e…

> What end-user advantage will cause people to buy devices that include FPGAs?

Well, the "consumer" (a term I do not like) would never even know there was an FPGA in their device.

Re: How FPGAs work, and why you'll buy one (2013)

#74

Post by mmagin »

jychang wrote: post #13

I am currently just another college student, but I have some experience in this field, as I had interned at Xilinx (which is the largest FPGA maker right now, iirc, although Altera may have taken the crown). I don't think your typical college CS student, and by extension, the average programmer, would be interested in using FPGAs right now. This isn't an issue of performance, or costs, or lack of use cases- FPGAs are…

Based on my limited experience playing with FPGA dev tools and boards as a hobbyist, this is my experience as well.

Not only is there a huge learning curve -- some of it is necessary (you are essentially doing concurrent programming), but some of it is the arbitrary way these proprietary tools work. As a complete beginner it's bad enough trying to get a very simple "divide the clock down to flash a LED on the dev board at 1 Hz", it's a whole additional thing to try to figure out "How do I edit the code in my favorite text editor instead of this stupid Windows IDE, and how can I invoke the build tools from make?"

Re: How FPGAs work, and why you'll buy one (2013)

#75

Post by chillingeffect »

anigbrowl wrote: post #45
jonaldomo wrote: post #11

I think FPGAs are an untapped technology. I would love a book by Manning or Pragmatic called "FPGAs in Action" or "101 FPGA Projects". I have no idea what to do with it besides try to make a bitcoin miner.

I have several FPGA-based devices, in hybrid digital-analog synthesizers. FPGAs allow rapid reconfiguration of signal routing between analog components, which latter deliver much nicer sound quality than DSPs for many requirements, especially filtering. There are also Field Programmable Analog Arrays but I don't have any of those, yet.

I would love to play with those for synths/audio/effects! Any recommendations on where to look? I look every few years and products come and go. Just now I looked and found this, which looks intriguing! I love to see more about these!

http://anadigm.com/apex-devkit.asp

Re: How FPGAs work, and why you'll buy one (2013)

#76

Post by viccuad »

noselasd wrote: post #38
viccuad wrote: post #18

I think a lot of people posting here don't realize that programming an FPGA means programming how the gates are set up on the FPGA, not software programming. VHDL/Verilog etc are descriptive languages, not software languages ala C/Python/Java/etc. You should have enough hardware design knowledge (at RT level) to be able to sketch your HW design in a piece of paper, and then, you are apt for writting VHDL/Verilog and…

I'm sure a lot of knowledge of hardware design helps, but it's not necessary. I've toyed around with VHDL on a DE0-Nano board, and while I have a lot of C experience I have none with HW design. I can still program enough to do simple things, e.g. sample an analog temperature sensor, drive a simple led display that display current temperature, average of last hour etc.

I would argue that for the job you are aiming for, you could do it more than fine with a microncontroller like a 3 bucks ATMEGA or Arduino. You would program it in C, and you don't need a 60 bucks FPGA + a 200 bucks for the FPGA controller.

If you are learning, meddling with FPGAs your way is awesome. But nobody is going to use that approach for serious work on production.

Re: How FPGAs work, and why you'll buy one (2013)

#77

Post by solve »

skaevola wrote: post #48
solve wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But are they the most efficient in cost-per-computation? For all the major data crunchers I'm familiar with, doing either finance or scientific calculations, that's the only metric they cared about. Only place I can see the cost-per-computation metric not mattering is in space satellites. Am I way off?

For any sort of mobile device energy-usage per computation is an important metric. Hence you have chips with multiple low power modes which can trade off different amounts of computational power with different amounts of power efficiency.

But ASIC is 100x better than FPGA for energy per computation. Know of any mobile devices that have FPGAs on them now?

Re: How FPGAs work, and why you'll buy one (2013)

#78

Post by viccuad »

vkjv wrote: post #50
viccuad wrote: post #18

I think a lot of people posting here don't realize that programming an FPGA means programming how the gates are set up on the FPGA, not software programming. VHDL/Verilog etc are descriptive languages, not software languages ala C/Python/Java/etc. You should have enough hardware design knowledge (at RT level) to be able to sketch your HW design in a piece of paper, and then, you are apt for writting VHDL/Verilog and…

While, I do have an EE degree, I play with FPGAs fairly frequently and rarely think about the hardware that I'm laying out. In my experience, unless you are building something either very large and need to worry about your gate count, or something very time sensitive and need to work about component distance, you can just program and enjoy real concurrency. :)

But the point of FPGAs is to be cost effective. They are a substitute for custom PCB designs with RT components and somewhat low production numbers (500~5.000 devices, depends on the FPGA etc).

Either you build something big enough that it doesn't make sense to make a PCB + components, and mass produce them on a medium level using FPGAs, or you aren't using FPGAs for what they are. It's fine if you are learning and toying with them, we like to hack on things, but you are never going to use them that way in a job, in production.

Re: How FPGAs work, and why you'll buy one (2013)

#79

Post by davexunit »

alain94040 wrote: post #63
davexunit wrote: post #53

The major issue with FPGAs today is that there is no free toolchain for compiling the bitstreams that run on them. The only project I know of to make any real progress on fixing this is fpgatools. [0] It supports a single model of the Xilinx Spartan-6 series, the XC6SLX9. I know almost nothing about FPGAs, but seeing as how almost no one is working on this problem, I figured I'd try to add support for the XC6SLX45, t…

I disagree strongly. The major issue with FPGAs today is that they cost money (because they are chips). They cost even more than your CPU. So you can't treat them life software. To put it in simpler words: everyone has access to a CPU, less than 1% have access to an FPGA. Fix that* and the tooling will follow. * one way to make FPGAs "free" is to incorporate some FPGA blocks in an Intel CPU. Then it will feel free.

Intel CPUs are anything but free. They contain nonfree microcode and other nastiness, so they would be unsuitable for free hardware projects.

Re: How FPGAs work, and why you'll buy one (2013)

#80

Post by fragmede »

catern wrote: post #64

What I'm having trouble understanding (as just a regular, not-hardcore programmer) is this: What end-user advantage will cause people to buy devices that include FPGAs? What use are they to a consumer? What interesting programs or devices can be created with an FPGA that can't be done otherwise? Basically, if "everyone can easily create whatever custom objects they need!" is the utopian vision for 3D printers, and "e…

> What end-user advantage will cause people to buy devices that include FPGAs?

As always, cost is a large motivator, and here's a concrete example.

Back in the day, 3ware, the makers of real hardware RAID cards shipped a line of PCI (or were they IDE?) cards that had an FPGA instead of an ASIC. You can bet that making an ASIC would have been far more costly to produce compared to an FPGA.

As far as your utopian vision goes, GNU Radio is probably it, but uptake on that has also been slow.

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