Any other FPGA engineers/hobbyists here
you might have better luck on >>>/diy/
>>108444227Idk if I count, I'm a compiler engineer and out hardware is FPGA? Idk, I just write software and I'm kinda dumb.
>>108444227I'd like to try this out. Problem is, the tool chains are often proprietary, incompatible and awkward. It is hard to know where to start and also what size FPGA is required for a project.
>>108445995verilator?iverilog?ghdl?yosys?risc-v?
>>108444227fpgas are fun. I design ASICs for my jobive been interested in how cryptography algorithms work so im trying to implement some in verilog
>>108446350Out of those I only know RISC-V and I think it is ugly.I have two main lines of interests here: - ISA design, and not RISC based stuff - /ham/ stuff, such as SDR related designs (FFT, windowing, demodulation etc.) especially direction finding, so that I can use a simple processor for most things but leave the heavy lifting to the FPGA.
>>108446424>fpgas are fun.What textbooks and tools do you recommend?
>>108444227seen em used at work but never messed with them myself. what's a good dev board to get into/learn fpga programming?
>>108447066I'm just a beginner myself so take this with a grain of salt, but I have a Basys 3, and it seems to have everything I need for learning the basics, and it doesn't break the bank at $165. By the time I actually need the stuff that makes the higher end stuff more expensive, that'll mean I'm knowledgeable enough at that point that the board will have served its purpose.
>>108447066a kria is like $250
https://retrorgb.com/mister.htmlhttps://ultimatemister.com/https://retroremake.co/products/mister-pi-retro-gaming-fpga-board-1
>>108446999You can get started without a board using iverilog and gtkwaveI heard nand2tetris is a good book but i mostly learned from school classes and doing projects
hft goon here this stuff is fun when you get to use new, otherwise you are stuck in systemverilog hellwish i could use bluespec at jobnew captcha is a fuck!!never mind im retarded and had to click next :^)
>>108446999I'd suggest going with commercial tools for when you actually do get a board. I have the Basys 3 and it's great.I've had luck learning structural Verilog design. RTL is a bit unintuitive when you're first starting out. So if I were you I'd learn the synthesizable constructs for DFFs, multipliers, etc. Vivado has a nice block diagram generator which helps when visualizing your design. The Hennesy computer architecture book is pretty good and some editions have Verilog examples and practice problems specifically related to CPU design.
I got a little Altera SoC board to fuck around with. I spent fucking days trying to read a single god damn byte of data across the CPU-FPGA bridge in either direction. Useless documentation, entire intel community website returns 404s, LLMs hallucinating everything about the process of setting it up. How nice it must be to have such a colossal barrier to entry for your trade, it does a good job of filtering out baby dick ricky retards like me
>have existed for decades now>0 use cases discovered outside of emulation
>>108449948Sometimes you just need a custom chip but not the volume required for a full run of getting ASICs made
>>108448601>going with commercial toolsOK; which ones?
>>108449948they are useful for ultra low latency applications
>>108449948feels like every second oem device nowadays has a fuckhuge fpga for god knows what
>>108454780Never noticed that. I had hoped the next Raspberry Pi had one integrated, and with free design tools.
>>108454780examples?
>>108454945
>>108454961huh ok looks like some specialized equipment, not surprised it uses an fpga
>>108446518>ISA designnot as much of that around academically as there used to be. look into homebrew cpu communities. https://www.homebrewcpuring.org/ringhome.html
>>108454999>not as much of that around academically as there used to be.I know, and what little there is to be found is heavily forced into RISC in general and RISC-V in particular. Orthodoxy is without end, yet in the real world, CISC is where it is at.>look into homebrew cpu communities. https://www.homebrewcpuring.org/ringhome.htmlYes, I know that one, many interesting things there. Oddly, many are 6502 inspired.
>>108454280Vivado if Xilinx, Quartus if Altera.
>>108455580Thanks.I hope we can make this into a general. There is much to learn.
