This is a step-by-step guide on my first project on the Avnet Spartan-3A. This will be a very simple project concentrating on the tool flow as opposed to design. To keep things simple we will capture the top level design as a schematic. The design will consist of blinking LED1 (pin D14) at a given [...]

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In this post I will outline a couple of solutions for a quadrature encoder generator in VHDL. I wanted a Quadrature Encoder signal for test purposes without the need to hook-up a real encoder and decided that an FPGA is perfect for this, especially considering that generating two signals with a 90-degree phase shift is [...]

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In a couple of previous posts (Counter and Seven Segment Display Decoder) I had put together components designed earlier (a simple counter and a seven segment decoder) for the sake of testing out the components, in particular the seven segment decoder. In that test the top-level entity was constructed entirely in Quartus II via schematic [...]

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We need a basic user interface component to display current settings, such as the current frequency of a frequency generator, say. To this end I will use the seven segment display (SSD) present on the DE2-70. Here I present two designs. One is a straight up look-up table and the other uses a minimized logic [...]

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At this stage, before progressing any further, I want to stress that it is prudent to get some degree of familiarity with VHDL. At the very least one should understand the following

Data types
Operators and attributes
Concurrent and Sequential code
Signals and variables

The above order is more or less what is presented in the Pedroni book (Circuit Design [...]

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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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