How to design an FPGA from scratch-1_FPGA_8_24

Editor's Note: As you will soon discover, the author – Sven – has created the most fantastic on-going tutorial on learning how to design with FPGAs from the ground up. This article is merely an introduction to Sven's tutorial which – at the time of writing – has 38 parts and is getting larger as we speak (the current contents list – with links to each section – is provided at the end of this "How To").

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Hello there. My name is Sven Andersson. I have been designing ASICs for more than 15 years. A few years ago I realized that there was another player in town – the FPGA. With increasing NRE costs and with the long turn-around times,ASIC designs have become high-risk projects. At the same time, FPGAs are getting bigger and faster and many companies have therefore decided to use only FPGAs. For this reason, I decided to take a closer look at FPGAs. This is my story of how I (hopefully) will learn to use FPGAs in my future designs.

Learning-by-doing
John Dewey (1859-1952) was an American philosopher and educator whose writings and teachings have had profound influences on education in the United States. Dewey's philosophy of education, instrumentalism, focused on "learning-by-doing" rather than rote learning and dogmatic instruction, the current practice of his day.

For Dewey, it was vitally important that education should not be the teaching of mere dead fact, but that the skills and knowledge which students learned be integrated fully into their lives as persons, citizens and human beings. So . . . let's practice learning-by-doing.

Let's get started
In order to learn anything, it's best to have some "real-world" project to work with. On this basis, we will design an embedded system, implementing some form ofprocessor-controlled test equipment.

Thereafter, we will write a software device driver and an application program to run on our system. The first thing we will do is to put together a FPGA design checklist. A checklist is used to compensate for the weaknesses of humanmemory so as to help ensure consistency and completeness in carrying out a task.

FPGA design checklist

• Make sure you have plenty of time to spare.
• Find a decent computer.
• If you can afford it, add a big display.
• Decide which operating system to use.
• Consider using a virtual machine (VM).
• Select an FPGA vendor.
• Pick out a suitable development board.
• Select an embedded processor to use.
• Download the FPGA design software.
• Add the latest service packs.
• Choosing a logic simulator.
• Choosing a synthesis tool.
• Learn C programming.
• Read my tutorial (grin) .

Make sure you have plenty of time to spare
It will take some time to set everything up, find all the information scattered all over the place and solve all problems along the way. I started this project December 2006 and I have not finished it yet. Learning from my mistakes will save you some time.

Find a decent computer
Almost any X86 equipped computer will do the job, but if you plan for some larger designs you should use a Intel Core Duo equipped computer. I am an old Mac fellow and will of course use my newMacBook with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor running at 2 GHz. I will add a 23" Cinema display to provide a large screen area.

Decide which operating system to use
Here we have three choices. We can use a UNIX operating system like Solaris if we happen to have a SPARC workstation from SUN available, or we can use Windows XP or Linux on an X86 computer. For myself the choice is easy. Coming from a UNIX world I will use a Linux distribution. After trying out Ubuntu Linux I fell in love immediately.

Consider using a virtual machine
I could of course install Linux directly on my computer, but that would stop me from using Mac OS X at the same time, and that I don't like. A perfect solution is to install Linux in a virtual machine (VM). There are at least three ways of doing this as follows

• Parallells Desktop
• VMware Fusion
• VirtualBox

After trying out Parallells Desktop and VMware Fusion, I decided to go with VMware Fusion.

Select an FPGA vendor
The two major FPGA vendors are Altera andXilinx. Choosing which one to use is not an easy decision. The deciding factor for me was the MicroBlaze soft processor from Xilinx.

Pick out a suitable development board
We could, of course, design an FPGA-based development system for ourselves, but using one of the development boards from Xilinx will make things much easier. Xilinx have a number of such boards in their catalog. Which one to pick? I decided to go for the ML403 board that has a Virtex-4 FPGA with a PowerPC 405 core. A cheaper alternative would be a Spartan 3 based board.

Select an embedded processor to use
As I mentioned earlier, I have already decided to use the MicroBlaze soft processor core. The MicroBlaze is a 32-bit Harvard RISC architecture optimized for Xilinx FPGAs. The basic architecture consists of 32 general-purpose registers, an Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU), a shift unit, and two levels of interrupt.

Download the FPGA design software
The ML403 board is bundled with two software packages called the Integrated Software Environment (ISE) andEmbedded Design Kit (EDK). These packages contain all the software needed to design and implement an embedded system. The latest version of the software can be downloaded from the Xilinx web page atwww.xilinx.com.

Adding the latest service packs
As always with software products there are updates and bug fixes. These are delivered in service packs that have to be downloaded and installed. It's very important to ensure that you have the latest service pack(s) installed, because this will save you a lot of headaches.

Choosing a logic simulator
The Xilinx software includes a very simple Verilog and VHDL Simulator that runs only under Windows XP. The commercial simulators available fromCadence,Synopsys, and Mentor cost a fortune and are out of reach for the normal user. What to do? Fortunately, I managed to convince Cadence that it would be a nice idea to give me an evaluation license for theirIncisive Unified Simulator that I could use.

Choosing a synthesis tool
The Xilinx software comes with the XST Synthesis Tool. There are a number of synthesis tool out on the market but I find XST to be sufficient for my needs.

Learn C-programming
If you don't have any experience with regard to programming in C, you should find a good textbook and start learning it immediately. Why? Well, apart from being a very useful thing to know in general, all the Xilinx software device drivers are written in C.