Welcome back to our three-part FPGA tutorial with SystemVerilog and the Digilent Arty A7. In this third instalment, we build a countdown timer and model traffic lights. There’s a lot to get through this time: enums, case statements, button debouncing, shift registers, and the all-important finite state machine. New to the series? Start with part 1. Updated 2021-12-21. Get in touch with @WillFlux or open an issue on GitHub. Requirements For this series, we are using the Digilent Arty A7-35T, a $130 dev board based on a Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA. Read more

Welcome back to our three-part FPGA tutorial with SystemVerilog and the Digilent Nexys Video. In part two, we’re going to learn about clocks and counting. Along the way, we’ll cover maintaining state with flip-flops, timing things with clock dividers, creating our first Verilog module, and controlling LEDs with pulse width modulation. This post is also available for the Arty. New to the series? Start with part 1. Updated 2021-06-28. Get in touch with @WillFlux or open an issue on GitHub. Read more

This three-part tutorial provides a quick introduction to FPGA development with SystemVerilog and the Digilent Nexys Video board. No prior experience of FPGA development is required, but basic knowledge of programming concepts is assumed. If you can write a simple program with Python or JavaScript, you shouldn’t have any trouble. I find working with FPGAs gives me a sense of delight so often lacking in modern software development. There’s something profoundly satisfying about designing at the hardware level, be it drawing graphics on a screen, producing sound from a speaker, or even implementing your own CPU from scratch. Read more

Welcome back to our three-part FPGA tutorial with SystemVerilog and the Digilent Arty A7. In part two, we’re going to learn about clocks and counting. Along the way, we’ll cover maintaining state with flip-flops, timing things with clock dividers, creating our first Verilog module, and controlling LEDs with pulse width modulation. You might be surprised how far counting takes you: by the end of this tutorial, you’ll be creating RGB lighting effects worthy of a cheesy gaming PC. Read more

This three-part tutorial provides a quick introduction to FPGA development with SystemVerilog and the Digilent Arty A7 board. No prior experience of FPGA development is required, but basic knowledge of programming concepts is assumed. If you can write a simple program with Python or JavaScript, you shouldn’t have any trouble. I find working with FPGAs gives me a sense of delight so often lacking in modern software development. There’s something profoundly satisfying about designing at the hardware level, be it drawing graphics on a screen, producing sound from a speaker, or even implementing your own CPU from scratch. Read more