FPGA fun
I recently aquired a TinyFpgaBX and have been investigating programming RTL.
After doing regular programming , thinking in gateware is a brain melter.
TinyFPGA-BX
Is a nifty little breadboard friendly board (website), this board has been designed by Luke Valenty and is a great little board to get started with FPGA programming.
A forum for development and troubleshooting is avalable here
Building reconfigurable logic
Historically the tooling needed to program FPGA has been vendor specific, the software has been huge, buggy, not portable and a usually windows only. Across the last few years there has been a renaissance for this technology. The prices have come down to hobby levels and a complete opensource tool chain has been built and the development is accelerating.
Structural Software
- Yosys - takes verilog and turns it into register transfer logic
- nextpnr - takes the logic and maps it onto a device image
- icestorm - takes the image and packages up for transport onto the FPGA
With these programs it is possbile to design, build and test verilog programs on an FPGA that is totally opensource.