Electronics > Beginners
Yet another question on scopes :)
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rstofer:

--- Quote from: dmills on October 05, 2018, 01:45:55 pm ---When a 'compile cycle' on a prototype PCA takes 6 weeks and costs £2,000 you swiftly start to see the problems with devops style release processes and 'agile'....

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The time lag has more of an impact on business since it extends 'time to market' and time is everything!  Late and great is still late!


--- Quote ---Always remember that you are describing hardware not control flow, it is a surprisingly different mindset sometimes.

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This is the hard part to wrap your head around until you have written a reasonably sizable project where modules interact in some way.  Keeping track of what is going to happen on the next clock edge is the name of the game.

That's one of the reasons I like the LC3 project.  It is a fairly simple CPU with a limited number of states and a bunch of little clocked processes registering results on demand from the state machine.  It is made easier by the amount of information on the Internet and the 'worksheet' provided for creating microcode - if one is going to use that approach.  I didn't but it is totally workable.

Like all things 'computer' first we do a "Hello World!" (a blinking LED in FPGA projects) and then we build a CPU.  There isn't much in the middle...

Separate topic:

hamster_nz is a frequent contributor over in the Microcontrollers and FPGA forum.  His work is excellent and there is a lot to learn from his projects:

http://hamsterworks.co.nz/mediawiki/index.php/FPGA_Projects

VHDL done right!
rstofer:

--- Quote from: llaith on October 05, 2018, 12:54:24 pm ---I'll bear in mind, don't skip the simulator. To be honest, I was kinda thinking to minimise the simulator as the whole point of me going from software to hardware is to get into the real world, but I see what you mean... the first few times I want to bang my head on the wall I'd regret skipping developing expertise in the simulation side.

I'll not allow myself to be tempted to skip over it, thanks!

:)

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There's a quote from the movie "Ronin"  (Robert DeNiro) :  "The only thing is that the map, the map is not the territory."

Similarly, the simulation is not the hardware.  When designing the hardware, you need to anticipate debugging at a hardware level.
Bassman59:

--- Quote from: dmills on October 04, 2018, 10:03:48 pm ---Chipscope (The Vivado logic analyser) is way cool as long as you have a big enough part to accommodate both your design and enough ram to hold the captured data and as long as you don't mind a rebuild every time you want to change the trigger conditions....

However the real art of HDL design is in learning to write test benches that can verify your designs in simulation to minimise the need for messing with chipscope, HDL is actually all about the simulator and learning to make the simulation match the hardware (And the places where it can deviate), you will write far more code for test beches then you will for actual synthesis (In a sense the EE crowd invented TDD years before the software guys).

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This is the truth!

And every time I go to make a change and say to myself, "nah, I don't need to re-run the test bench," the thing doesn't work and I re-run the test bench and see the problem straight away.

Every single time.
llaith:

--- Quote from: rstofer on October 05, 2018, 02:50:13 pm ---Like all things 'computer' first we do a "Hello World!" (a blinking LED in FPGA projects) and then we build a CPU.  There isn't much in the middle...

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Haha, I'm so totally guilty of exactly the same thing, played with my arduino a bit, discovered FPGA's, decided I should create a CPU cause I always wondered 'how they worked' :)

To be fair though, I was inspired by a dramatisation on the BBC about the Sinclair vs Acorn era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Men (I was sent to a 'computer camp' in the hols before high school started, with the ZX-81 and Spectrum). From that drama, I became a fan of the real world Prof. Steve Furber (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Furber) and Sophie Wilson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson). Although I am following Steve's amazing work with the Human Brain Project, Sophie is also an incredibly inspiring and humble person, and I was blown away by this talk given to an audience of fellow Erlangers: , which offered a a truly fascinating perspective on the industry. I'm pretty sure she's spot on, it will be machine learning algorithms in FPGA's that will power the future of computing via massive parallelisation.


--- Quote ---hamster_nz is a frequent contributor over in the Microcontrollers and FPGA forum.  His work is excellent and there is a lot to learn from his projects:

http://hamsterworks.co.nz/mediawiki/index.php/FPGA_Projects

VHDL done right!

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Excellent link, thanks! Nicely documented VHDL also, very cool. Ta!
rstofer:
A very interesting talk!

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