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 tool that targeted hardware (read FPGA) optimizable sections of C code to FPGA with automatic partitioning and automatic conversion of code to VHDL and eventually to downloadable bitstreams. This technology also goes under the umbrella of reconfigurable computing. This was a very promising and, I believe, ahead-of-its-time technology. However, funding dried up and here I am.
Anyway, fast forward to today and I am in a situation where I am finding that knowing FPGA development as an embedded engineer can come in handy. I had a recent requirement to create a test unit that simulates a quadrature encoder that could go from 0-100KHz but for the life of me could not find a circuit that can generate two typical square waves with a 90 degree phase. A 555 timer can generate a square wave but what about the other 90-phase signal? Of course, one option was to use an 8051 and simply bit-bang the signals. But there is another way, use an FPGA!
Not knowing much about this and being a total newbie at the development aspects of FPGAs I embarked on a search. What tools to use, Xilinx, Altera? Both offer free “web” versions. What about chips? Does it really matter? What about the HDL? Verilog or VHDL? Any nice and cheap development boards to learn off? Well I will detail these findings in the forth coming posts. I also plan to share my journey in this domain and hopefully share code, insights, etc in the hopes that it may aid someone else to learn. Another motivation for sharing is that it helps me document my journey, but, foremost it forces me to document it well and retrace my steps so that not only does my learning experience become deeper but I have somewhere to go if I need a reference.
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Thanks for post. Nice to see such good ideas.