NOTES UNIT 1: PART 1

Hardware Description Languages (HDL) Two popular HDLs. 

Verilog and VHDL The U.S. Department of Defense funded VHDL Gateway Design Automation developed Verilog to drive the Verilog simulator. In the early 1990s, the electronics industry was forced to contend with the “language wars,” where competing factions in either the VHDL or Verilog camp competed for an engineer’s mindset and desktop. 

    Both languages survived and now coexist, often in the same design flow. Co-Design designed SystemVerilog, initially known as SUPERLOG. After Synopsys acquired Co-Design, SUPERLOG/SystemVerilog was placed in the public domain as well.

     IEEE industry standards –– VHDL is IEEE 1076-2008, Verilog is IEEE 1364-2005 & SystemVerilog is IEEE 1800-2012.

        FPGA boards & software

¥Boards Basys3 & Arty belongs to Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA .

¥Basysy3 has digital peripherals

¥Arty has Arduino Compatible pins

Introduction

An FPGA is itself a digital system composed of basic building blocks.

Therefore, some digital logic background is necessary to understand the FPGA architecture.

To do so, we start with the basics of digital electronics in this

chapter. Then, we explain the architecture of FPGA using abstract building blocks.

As we overview the FPGA architecture in this chapter, we focus on digital system design and implementation philosophy using FPGA.

All digital devices are based on binary representation. In other saying, everything in a digital device is represented in terms of two logic levels as zero and one. In its basic sense, we have two voltage levels to represent a binary digit (either as zero or one). Let’s call these as ground (zero) and supply voltage (VCC). These correspond to binary logic levels zero and one respectively. Therefore, whenever we talk about a bit value as zero or one, we actually mean a voltage level as either ground or supply voltage.