FPGA Design for Software Engineers
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FPGA Design for Software Engineers
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Re: FPGA Design for Software Engineers
#2I've been looking for something like this for a while. It's hard to break into FPGA design coming from a Software Engineering viewpoint, but I think it teaches how the machine REALLY works and can produce better Software developers.
Re: FPGA Design for Software Engineers
#3I've been looking for something like this for a while. It's hard to break into FPGA design coming from a Software Engineering viewpoint, but I think it teaches how the machine REALLY works and can produce better Software developers.
I found Digital Design by Mano and Ciletti to be a nice introduction to the basic building blocks of digital circuits. Four weeks later I'm studying laplace transforms and transfer functions please send help.
Re: FPGA Design for Software Engineers
#4I've been looking for something like this for a while. It's hard to break into FPGA design coming from a Software Engineering viewpoint, but I think it teaches how the machine REALLY works and can produce better Software developers.
I found Digital Design by Mano and Ciletti to be a nice introduction to the basic building blocks of digital circuits. Four weeks later I'm studying laplace transforms and transfer functions please send help.
[deleted]
Re: FPGA Design for Software Engineers
#5I've been looking for something like this for a while. It's hard to break into FPGA design coming from a Software Engineering viewpoint, but I think it teaches how the machine REALLY works and can produce better Software developers.
how is that true? which component in a modern processor is akin to an fpga or any ip deployed to an fpga?
Re: FPGA Design for Software Engineers
#6I recently got a TinyFPGA-BX, and have been slowly working through the tutorials. The amusing thing is that, for the actual applications I'm working on, a contemporary microcontroller can actually keep up just fine, and is easier for me to comprehend. Still, one of these days, a use will for an FPGA will crop up for which I'll be glad that I learned.
Re: FPGA Design for Software Engineers
#7I've been looking for something like this for a while. It's hard to break into FPGA design coming from a Software Engineering viewpoint, but I think it teaches how the machine REALLY works and can produce better Software developers.
I found Digital Design by Mano and Ciletti to be a nice introduction to the basic building blocks of digital circuits. Four weeks later I'm studying laplace transforms and transfer functions please send help.
Good on you, every idiot can count to one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Widlar#Fairchild_Semicondu...
Re: FPGA Design for Software Engineers
#8I recently got a TinyFPGA-BX, and have been slowly working through the tutorials. The amusing thing is that, for the actual applications I'm working on, a contemporary microcontroller can actually keep up just fine, and is easier for me to comprehend. Still, one of these days, a use will for an FPGA will crop up for which I'll be glad that I learned.
I find this to be true for a lot of applications. Some times it seems like fpgas are hammers looking for a nail.
Where they can shine is if you need some odd combination of peripherals attached to a microcontroller: think of something like a uc with 4 uarts or multiple separate i2c buses.
Anywhere you need a lot of parallel processing that you can guarantee won't be interrupted, like a video processing pipeline is also a good fit.
Re: FPGA Design for Software Engineers
#9This is a pretty nice tutorial! My courses in FPGA design in school taught me a ton about 1) concurrency and 2) good state machine design. In modern backend web development these topics receive so little attention (from interviewing all the way to writing technical specs, I've rarely encountered these topics brought up explicitly) but are important. I was a bit hesitant for this guide to suggest using C++ since I tend to dislike mixing traditional languages with hardware languages but I realized it was just for testbenches, which is very reasonable (and even VHDL exposes things like `for` loops that are really only useful for testing and meaningless otherwise - sans some special cases[1]).
[1] You can abuse some imperative paradigms to implement things like Conway's Game of Life as a systolic array - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systolic_array
Re: FPGA Design for Software Engineers
#10I've been looking for something like this for a while. It's hard to break into FPGA design coming from a Software Engineering viewpoint, but I think it teaches how the machine REALLY works and can produce better Software developers.
how is that true? which component in a modern processor is akin to an fpga or any ip deployed to an fpga?
The CPU itself? For example, implementing a toy CPU is much much closer to how an actual, non-FPGA CPU works than, say, an emulator. But really anything done on an FPGA should teach you some portion of gate-level logic (yeah yeah, there's LUTs and other specialized cells instead of gates, close enough).
And staying above physics, that's how computers work.