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FPGA design tips and tutorials


MicroZed Chronicles: You Really Should Use a MicroBlaze V
I see a lot of designs across a range of industries and applications. One thing that always stands out is that designs often use complex state machines to implement features such as I²C, SPI, GPIO sequencing, etc. Often, these FSMs become unwieldy and complex, which adds to bring-up and debugging challenges. Of course, these FSMs also need to be verified in simulation and again on the board once they arrive. When I am asked to work with these interfaces in an FPGA, I often re
7 hours ago5 min read


MicroZed Chronicles: Remote AXI Control via UART
I’ve been meaning to take a closer look at our new Spartan-7 Tile Rev B and the Tile Carrier Card for a while now. They’ve been sitting on my lab bench while I’ve been wrapping up work from recent conferences and client projects, so this week, I finally found the time. The Spartan-7 Tile Rev B is an evolution of the original Rev A design. It includes a revised boot-mode selection switch in place of a jumper and features a slightly different pinout to support discrete JTAG. T
Nov 53 min read


MicroZed Chronicles: So You Want to Run Your Own Engineering Company
Recently, I’ve noticed a lot of questions on social media and Reddit/FPGA about setting up your own engineering company. Having run one for about 15 years now, I thought I’d hold a webinar on running your own business. The webinar was one of the most enjoyable I’ve done in a while. You can see the full webinar here , but I thought it might be a good idea to share some key takeaways from the session in this blog. Being highly technical and competent on its own is not enough .
Oct 294 min read


MicroZed Chronicles: PYNQ 3.1 and PYNQ.remote
Long-time readers of this blog will know that I am a huge fan of the PYNQ framework. We have used PYNQ in several blogs and Hackster projects, most recently in one that used a LIDAR to help control the safety of a robotic arm as it operated in its environment. PYNQ has also featured heavily in our webinars over the years. I was therefore very excited to discover a few weeks ago that version 3.1 of PYNQ had been released. This is the first release of PYNQ since version 3.0 in
Oct 224 min read


MicroZed Chronicles: VEK280
Over the past few months, we’ve explored several Versal™ AI Edge development boards, including the Trenz TE0905 and the Alinx Txxxx. Each of these boards is built around the VE2303 device, which provides 330K system logic cells, 464 DSP engines, 34 AI Engine-ML tiles, and 5 NoC ports. For a recent AI development project, however, I needed something with significantly more capability. That led me to the VEK280, which features the largest device in the Versal AI Edge family. It
Oct 154 min read


MicroZed Chronicles: FPGA Horizons
Back in February, I announced the first dedicated FPGA conference, to be held in London on October 7th. Once we had settled on a name,...
Oct 84 min read


MicroZed Chronicles: Boundary Scan
Recently we have been developing numerous boards based around AMD devices from our Spartan 7 and RPI2040 based embedded system board, to...
Oct 14 min read


MicroZed Chronicles: SFP, SFP+ and QSFP
FPGAs are great, they allow us to process data at rates unachievable by any other means. However, this comes with a challenge: we need to...
Sep 244 min read


MicroZed Chronicles: Chip2Chip
Recently, I’ve been looking at a project that uses Aurora to transfer data over fibre as fast as possible from one FPGA to another. The...
Sep 174 min read


MicroZed Chronicles: Versal AI Engines
Over the last few months I have been doing a lot of work with Versal devices and the AI Engines provided on devices like the XCV2302 and...
Sep 105 min read


MicroZed Chronicles: SCU35 and Accelerometer.
Recently, I have been doing a lot of work with the SCU35 and the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA it features. Much of this work revolves around...
Sep 34 min read


MicroZed Chronicles: Design Reuse in IP Integrator
One project we have in the pipeline involves the need to transfer data from one FPGA to another over a fibre link with minimal delay....
Aug 274 min read


MicroZed Chronicles : What do I actually do?
I am a regular contributor to many FPGA channels. A few days ago, someone posted a question about what FPGA consultants actually do. The...
Aug 205 min read


MicroZed Chronicles: MathWorks Deep Learning Processor
One of the things we have been working on recently is a project that examines telemetry on a satellite. This system uses machine learning...
Aug 134 min read


MicroZed Chronicles: Getting to Grips with DSP in FPGA.
Recently I was talking to a good friend of mine and he mentioned that a lot of the FPGA engineers he was talking to lacked DSP...
Aug 64 min read


MicroZed Chronicles: High Speed Debugging of Logic.
One of the key messages I am keen to always stress is that we should simulate our designs, before testing them in hardware. However there...
Jul 304 min read


MicroZed Chronicles: Vivado Simulator and Code Coverage.
When it comes to developing FPGAs it is often tempting to write our RTL and then try it, in the lab on the hardware to see how it works....
Jul 236 min read


MicroZed Chronicles: Imaging with AMD Artix™ 7 FPGA & AMD Artix™ UltraScale+™ FPGA
If you follow my Hackster projects , you’ll know that one area that significantly interests me is image processing applications. Two of...
Jul 164 min read


MicroZed Chronicles: Spartan UltraScale+ and the SCU35 Board
The Spartan UltraScale+ family is designed to provide developers at the edge with a wide range of interfacing solutions, coupled with...
Jul 94 min read


MicroZed Chronicles: Embedded Plus+ Architecture.
One thing which has been interesting to me since I first came across it was the embedded+ architecture. Developed by Sapphire Technology...
Jul 23 min read
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