Comments on: First FPGA project ideas

By: Neo Cambell

Neo Cambell — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:06:41 +0000

Very good starting points…

By: digitalpbk

digitalpbk — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 04:01:16 +0000

Mike, that’s a very interesting project. I always wanted to do something with the LCD’s.
If you are willing to share the verilog code for the sharp LCD’s please mail’em to me. Thanks a lot.

By: Michael Magin

Michael Magin — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 17:44:04 +0000

Yes, I expect to spend some time debugging the hardware. So far, I have a simulator on my computer working, so I can write an assembler and a forth. I expect that I’ll need to instrument the real hardware pretty well to debug any hardware issues. I expect to learn a bit about what Altera lets you do via the JTAG interface and their design software — I know it can instantiate a pseudo-logic-analyzer to inspect what’s going on in your design. (Admittedly taking up some space in the FPGA, but with this FPGA, a simple 16 bit CPU shouldn’t take up too much space.)

Though, for more software level debugging, I’ll probably just load some minimal code that lets me inspect/manipulate memory on the running system via a serial port. (and eventually from there to a full interactive forth session on the target.)

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 17:16:51 +0000

I built a 16 bit CPU a couple of years ago. It is similar to Tanenbaum’s in his Architecture book, but the microcode is all original. The machine is stack based because I have a friend who loves Forth. The only advice I have is you will need a way to debug a running system. In my case, I came up with a single clock step (not single instruction step) and I provided an external mechanism which allowed me to set switchs to output the value of any register (programmer visible or not) to the 7 segment LED’s on my Digilent board. This step was invaluable.

By: Abhishek Shrestha

Abhishek Shrestha — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 12:04:24 +0000

Thanks, it would be better to get some more ideas