Is the FPGA SIG still meeting?

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ping @sjdavies

Is the FPGA SIG still meeting? If so, when are the meetings? I’d like to dip my toes in and learn.
The workshop that @sjdavies ran earlier in the year was very interesting!

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Hi Jamie,
sort of. It hasn’t met as a distinct group since the workshops but Andrew, Eyal and I have had frequent FPGA discussions during electronics wednesdays.

I’m always happy to help out. Right now my attendance has been irregular due to a casual work roster, I get there when I can. I am happy to help out, either in person or via the forum/email.

As far as getting started goes I suggest you first of all chase up the Digilent Basys 3 board that was donated to the space. I passed it on to Ryan a few months back. Given past events it may simply be somewhere at the space. If not I can chase him down. Second, download and install the Xilinx Vivado software, see https://github.com/makehackvoid/fpga-sig/blob/master/2018_cpu/docs/lab01.md.

Knowing nothing about your knowledge of digital logic I suggest a good starting point would be to download either of the texts by Pong Chu (orange = vhdl, green = verilog). My preference is for Verilog as it’s syntactically close to C and doesn’t have as strict a typing system as VHDL i.e. less work casting expressions to get what you want.

The digital logic texts I’ve seen tend to start with theory, e.g. boolean logic, truth tables, karnaugh maps etc. then progress into combinational then sequential logic.

Depending on your level of expertise you may want to create code:

  1. Basic module structure - switches and LEDs, no logic
  2. Extend 1 to introduce basic logic functions such as not, and, and, or, nor and xor. This is an excellent point to introduce continuous assignment and the structural and data flow styles.
  3. Learn about procedural code and its implementation in parallel hardware.
  4. Implement basic combinational logic like a 1 of 4 decoder ala 74LS139
  5. Implement half and full adders
  6. Implement a 74LS181 ALU equivalent
  7. Sequential logic etc.

Merry Christmas,
Stephen

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BTW, in November there was some discussion related to getting started in the electronics wednesdays group. I went home and started writing a tutorials section but never write got around to adding it to Github.

I’ve just committed a longish tutorial that covers points 2-4 above. Not quite complete but readers questions are an excellent motivation for me to extract the digit.