News: November 2021
Welcome to your November news from Project F. This month’s new blog post covers multiplication with DSPs, plus there are loads of interesting links and an FPGA advent calendar. I’m also happy to report that the main Project F repo projf-explore passed 200 stars on GitHub.
For more frequent updates on new blog posts and FPGA designs, follow @WillFlux@mastodon.social and @WillGreen (GitHub). You can also find me on 1BitSquared Discord.
The Project F blog is resting over the winter. The next post will be in spring 2022.
Multiplication with FPGA DSPs
In a change to advertised programming, I posted a brand new blog entry covering multiplication using DSP blocks. I had intended to cover real numbers this month, but the feedback I receive strongly favours hands-on, practical posts that academic sources tend not to cover. I hope you find this post useful.
In Multiplication with FPGA DSPs, I take some simple mathematical functions, such as X cubed, and graph them on screen. As the complexity of the maths increases, the benefits to separate pipeline stages also increases. The design of the demos makes it easy to experiment with your own mathematical function.
Quick Updates
As well as new designs and posts, I aim to improve some existing resources each month. Here are a few of the changes during November:
- Pong Simulation - Verilator SDL sim of Pong from FPGA Graphics
- iCE40 FPGA Toolchain on Linux - latest instructions
- Recommended FPGA Sites - updated recommended blogs
- Roadmap - updated for the end of 2021
FPGA Advent Calendar
Check out the FPGA Advent Calendar (Twitter) featuring inspiring news and projects from 2021.
Interesting Links
- YosysHQ is Hiring (yosyshq.com)
- DarkRISCV gains interrupt support (Marcelo Samsoniuk on GitHub)
- The software side of custom hardware is unpleasant (John Carmack on Twitter)
- PAWS RISC-V SoC v1 Released (Rob Shelton on GitHub)
- Arm-Nvidia deal: UK orders further inquiry (BBC News)
- Renesas to enter #FPGA market with ForgeFPGA (renesas.com)
- Reverse engineering the The Yamaha #DX7 (Ken Shirriff on Twitter)
And Finally: Mysterious Mountains
You’re playing the best game ever made.
In the distance, mysterious mountains.
What if you could open this door?
Read the June 2022 news or see the news archive.
Sponsor Project F
If you like what I do, consider sponsoring me on GitHub.
I use contributions to spend more time creating open-source FPGA designs and tutorials.