Now that we have a handle on the basic design flow we need to start working with VHDL to get on to bigger projects. Again to get a handle on working with VHDL I decided that I will take our original first project and capture it entirely in VHDL. It may be prudent to look [...]

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I will not go into the details of how SignalTap II (.stp) files are created and added to a design as these steps are fully detailed in the online tutorial # OCDSW1165. Before we begin, however, we need to add a clock to our design as SignalTap needs a clock to use for capturing. If [...]

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We will now analyze our previous design using the simulator, but first it may be useful to look at the online tutorial on simulation # ODSW1120. The foundation series course (ODSW1110) is also very useful in laying the foundations used here.
Simulation can be done in two ways either from within Quartus II or through ModelSim [...]

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In the Embedded world your standard Embedded microprocessor/DSP has all the peripherals preset and connected to the computation logic, although this is changing these days (see Cypress for their PSoC Mixed Signal Arrays). Additionally, these peripherals can also asynchronously interrupt the microprocessor when they need servicing. All the appropriate connections and signaling to the peripheral [...]

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It appears the Terasic board is the best board to start with since it has a lot of features for the price. It is even cheaper if you can buy it as a student. If you opted to go with Xilinx tools for whatever reason I found that Digilent has lots of interesting and cheap [...]

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Having scoured a few web sites and talked to a few people it appears that the Altera Tools (Quartus II Web Edition for the free version) was the way to go for beginners. Choosing the tool, of course, also decides the chipset one will be locked into. You can find a comparison between the Web [...]

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First off before choosing the tool I needed to get some sources of reference. I also needed to decide on the language of choice, Verilog or VHDL (there is SystemC as well but I won’t go there). Some research and talking to a couple of folks in the know led me nowhere. Language choices are [...]

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My embedded systems sojourn has been quite typical, vis, 8/16/32 bit microprocessors, driver development, and some GUI work for test tools to excercize my embedded systems. However, I have been involved with FPGAs both as an observer and more closely in hardware design cycles involving FPGA’s. In my previous life I worked on a compiler [...]

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I am an Embedded Systems Developer and have been thinking about blogging for a while to share some thoughts. I have a lot of side projects I would like to do and slowly hope to implement these over time. This is a place where I will share some of these projects and, where possible, present [...]

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