FPGA Demo Tuesday 7PM

[Daniel Crews]

On Tuesday at 7PM we will present a basic FPGA demo/show and tell, as
inspiration for FPGA classes Daniel C. will be offering.

A Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is an integrated circuit, inside
which you can wire up a logic circuit using software code.  With this
you can achieve results you cannot do with a microprocessor, such as
true parallelism without timesharing.  You can wire up LARGE circuits.

Daniel C. will be showing a "full adder" circuit design, and the
simulation and testing of it.  Brian B. will be showing off his
in-progress FPGA demo board that he's added some inputs to.

Demos will include:

A $50 evaluation board containing an FPGA with almost 8,000 logic cells;

An open source toolchain running on Ubuntu 14 to program the FPGA using
the Verilog software language;

A different open source toolchain to simulate and test Verilog code;

A full adder circuit that adds two numbers, which both runs in hardware
and simulates;

An open source soft CPU coded in the FPGA, upon which runs an
implementation of the Forth language and environment, running a program
to calculate the date of Easter;

Future projects for this board may include an implementation of a video
card driving a VGA monitor in text mode, and low-speed ethernet.

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Fin