#FPGA development

[volersystems]

Apart from the FPGA design, Voler Systems formulated the necessary firmware for board functionality testing that enabled to customer to finalize their firmware development. Voler Systems worked closely with their mechanical design team to match the device’s electrical, mechanical, and environmental requirements. Their engineers made sure that the device was functional, durable, and reliable under the extreme conditions, often common during military operations.

[jsies2rrel]

Future Electronics to Host Future Tech Day in Hefei, China

Future Electronics, a global leader in electronics distribution, is excited to announce the upcoming "Future Tech Day" portion of the 2024 China Tech Day series—focusing on the automotive industry. The event will take place on Wednesday, September 25th in Hefei, with another session planned in Hangzhou later this year.

[jhnn2nson]

Future Electronics' full Advanced Engineering with sharing of engineering ideas

Future Electronics’ Advanced Engineering Group provides in-depth engineering services. Founded in 1968, Future Electronics is a global leader in the electronic components industry. Future Electronics' award-winning customer service, global supply chain programs and industry-leading engineering design services have made the company a strategic partner of choice.

[rlph2yons]

Future Electronics, recognized their partnership with Infineon

Future Electronics and Infineon Technologies recently hosted a webinar, which taught attendees about the benefits and use cases of Infineon’s cutting-edge memory solutions.

[athy2llerr]

Future Electronics Invites Employees to Annual Holiday Luncheon

This festive event wraps up Future Electronics’ Spirit of the Holidays initiative. Throughout December, the company will be hosting a series of fun moments to give back to employees and gather food, toys, and monetary donations for those less fortunate.

[volersystems]

A leading aerospace company experienced this challenge head-on while developing a wearable night vision camera designed for military operations. With strict requirements for size, weight, power consumption, and performance, the company required a trustworthy partner with specialized expertise. Voler Systems, well-known for its innovation in FPGA design, electronic design, wearables, and firmware, collaborated to bring this ambitious project to life.

[tmoty2llr]

Future Electronics, a distributor of electronic components founded in 1968

Future Electronics, a leading global distributor of electronic components, recently received Diodes Incorporated’s Best Global Distributor Award for 2023.

[learnandgrowcommunity]

VHDL Tutorial - Complete Guide to VHDL Process Statement for Beginners [20 mins] [Easy Way]

Welcome to this comprehensive VHDL tutorial where we will dive into the VHDL process statement. In this easy-to-follow guide, we will take you through the syntax and usage of the VHDL process statement, catering especially to beginners. This tutorial will provide you with a thorough understanding of the VHDL process and how it can be effectively implemented in your projects.

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[androgynoustimemachineprince]

ALTERA Cyclone IV EP4CE10 FPGA Development Board

This is an all-new development board based on EP4CE10 FPGA. The ALTERA Cyclone IV EP4CE10 FPGA Development Board extends the cyclone FPGA series leadership in providing the market’s lowest cost, lowest power FPGAs, now with a transceiver variant. Cyclone IV devices are targeted to high-volume, cost-sensitive applications, enabling system designers to meet increasing bandwidth requirements while lowering costs.

[john2beet]

Future Electronics, thank Global Connector Technology for their endless support

For over 30 years, GCT has been manufacturing electronic interconnects. A member of the Aloco Group, GCT is an established manufacturer of world class PCB connector and case assembly solutions with an extensive product range and it has a strong partnership with Future Electronics.

[andmaybegayer]

What are some of the coolest computer chips ever, in your opinion?

Hmm. There are a lot of chips, and a lot of different things you could call a Computer Chip. Here's a few that come to mind as "interesting" or "important", or, if I can figure out what that means, "cool".

If your favourite chip is not on here honestly it probably deserves to be and I either forgot or I classified it more under "general IC's" instead of "computer chips" (e.g. 555, LM, 4000, 7000 series chips, those last three each capable of filling a book on their own). The 6502 is not here because I do not know much about the 6502, I was neither an Apple nor a BBC Micro type of kid. I am also not 70 years old so as much as I love the DEC Alphas, I have never so much as breathed on one.

Disclaimer for writing this mostly out of my head and/or ass at one in the morning, do not use any of this as a source in an argument without checking.

Intel 3101

So I mean, obvious shout, the Intel 3101, a 64-bit chip from 1969, and Intel's first ever product. You may look at that, and go, "wow, 64-bit computing in 1969? That's really early" and I will laugh heartily and say no, that's not 64-bit computing, that is 64 bits of SRAM memory.

This one is cool because it's cute. Look at that. This thing was completely hand-designed by engineers drawing the shapes of transistor gates on sheets of overhead transparency and exposing pieces of crudely spun silicon to light in a """"cleanroom"""" that would cause most modern fab equipment to swoon like a delicate Victorian lady. Semiconductor manufacturing was maturing at this point but a fab still had more in common with a darkroom for film development than with the mega expensive building sized machines we use today.

As that link above notes, these things were really rough and tumble, and designs were being updated on the scale of weeks as Intel learned, well, how to make chips at an industrial scale. They weren't the first company to do this, in the 60's you could run a chip fab out of a sufficiently well sealed garage, but they were busy building the background that would lead to the next sixty years.

Lisp Chips

This is a family of utterly bullshit prototype processors that failed to be born in the whirlwind days of AI research in the 70's and 80's.

Lisps, a very old but exceedingly clever family of functional programming languages, were the language of choice for AI research at the time. Lisp compilers and interpreters had all sorts of tricks for compiling Lisp down to instructions, and also the hardware was frequently being built by the AI researchers themselves with explicit aims to run Lisp better.

The illogical conclusion of this was attempts to implement Lisp right in silicon, no translation layer.

Yeah, that is Sussman himself on this paper.

These never left labs, there have since been dozens of abortive attempts to make Lisp Chips happen because the idea is so extremely attractive to a certain kind of programmer, the most recent big one being a pile of weird designd aimed to run OpenGenera. I bet you there are no less than four members of r/lisp who have bought an Icestick FPGA in the past year with the explicit goal of writing their own Lisp Chip. It will fail, because this is a terrible idea, but damn if it isn't cool.

There were many more chips that bridged this gap, stuff designed by or for Symbolics (like the Ivory series of chips or the 3600) to go into their Lisp machines that exploited the up and coming fields of microcode optimization to improve Lisp performance, but sadly there are no known working true Lisp Chips in the wild.

Zilog Z80

Perhaps the most important chip that ever just kinda hung out. The Z80 was almost, almost the basis of The Future. The Z80 is bizzare. It is a software compatible clone of the Intel 8080, which is to say that it has the same instructions implemented in a completely different way.

This is, a strange choice, but it was the right one somehow because through the 80's and 90's practically every single piece of technology made in Japan contained at least one, maybe two Z80's even if there was no readily apparent reason why it should have one (or two). I will defer to Cathode Ray Dude here: What follows is a joke, but only barely

The Z80 is the basis of the MSX, the IBM PC of Japan, which was produced through a system of hardware and software licensing to third party manufacturers by Microsoft of Japan which was exactly as confusing as it sounds. The result is that the Z80, originally intended for embedded applications, ended up forming the basis of an entire alternate branch of the PC family tree.

It is important to note that the Z80 is boring. It is a normal-ass chip but it just so happens that it ended up being the focal point of like a dozen different industries all looking for a cheap, easy to program chip they could shove into Appliances.

Effectively everything that happened to the Intel 8080 happened to the Z80 and then some. Black market clones, reverse engineered Soviet compatibles, licensed second party manufacturers, hundreds of semi-compatible bastard half-sisters made by anyone with a fab, used in everything from toys to industrial machinery, still persisting to this day as an embedded processor that is probably powering something near you quietly and without much fuss. If you have one of those old TI-86 calculators, that's a Z80. Oh also a horrible hybrid Z80/8080 from Sharp powered the original Game Boy.

I was going to try and find a picture of a Z80 by just searching for it and look at this mess! There's so many of these things.

I mean the C/PM computers. The ZX Spectrum, I almost forgot that one! I can keep making this list go! So many bits of the Tech Explosion of the 80's and 90's are powered by the Z80. I was not joking when I said that you sometimes found more than one Z80 in a single computer because you might use one Z80 to run the computer and another Z80 to run a specialty peripheral like a video toaster or music synthesizer. Everyone imaginable has had their hand on the Z80 ball at some point in time or another. Z80 based devices probably launched several dozen hardware companies that persist to this day and I have no idea which ones because there were so goddamn many.

The Z80 eventually got super efficient due to process shrinks so it turns up in weird laptops and handhelds! Zilog and the Z80 persist to this day like some kind of crocodile beast, you can go to RS components and buy a brand new piece of Z80 silicon clocked at 20MHz. There's probably a couple in a car somewhere near you.

Pentium (P6 microarchitecture)

Yeah I am going to bring up the Hackers chip. The Pentium P6 series is currently remembered for being the chip that Acidburn geeks out over in Hackers (1995) instead of making out with her boyfriend, but it is actually noteworthy IMO for being one of the first mainstream chips to start pulling serious tricks on the system running it.

The P6 microarchitecture comes out swinging with like four or five tricks to get around the numerous problems with x86 and deploys them all at once. It has superscalar pipelining, it has a RISC microcode, it has branch prediction, it has a bunch of zany mathematical optimizations, none of these are new per se but this is the first time you're really seeing them all at once on a chip that was going into PC's.

Without these improvements it's possible Intel would have been beaten out by one of its competitors, maybe Power or SPARC or whatever you call the thing that runs on the Motorola 68k. Hell even MIPS could have beaten the ageing cancerous mistake that was x86. But by discovering the power of lying to the computer, Intel managed to speed up x86 by implementing it in a sensible instruction set in the background, allowing them to do all the same clever pipelining and optimization that was happening with RISC without having to give up their stranglehold on the desktop market. Without the P5 we live in a very, very different world from a computer hardware perspective.

From this falls many of the bizzare microcode execution bugs that plague modern computers, because when you're doing your optimization on the fly in chip with a second, smaller unix hidden inside your processor eventually you're not going to be cryptographically secure.

RISC is very clearly better for, most things. You can find papers stating this as far back as the 70's, when they start doing pipelining for the first time and are like "you know pipelining is a lot easier if you have a few small instructions instead of ten thousand massive ones.

x86 only persists to this day because Intel cemented their lead and they happened to use x86. True RISC cuts out the middleman of hyperoptimizing microcode on the chip, but if you can't do that because you've girlbossed too close to the sun as Intel had in the late 80's you have to do something.

The Future

This gets us to like the year 2000. I have more chips I find interesting or cool, although from here it's mostly microcontrollers in part because from here it gets pretty monotonous because Intel basically wins for a while. I might pick that up later. Also if this post gets any longer it'll be annoying to scroll past. Here is a sample from a post I have in my drafts since May:

I have some notes on the weirdo PowerPC stuff that shows up here it's mostly interesting because of where it goes, not what it is. A lot of it ends up in games consoles. Some of it goes into mainframes. There is some of it in space. Really got around, PowerPC did.

[wirewitchviolet]

Hell is terms like ASIC, FPGA, and PPU

I haven't been doing any public updates on this for a bit, but I am still working on this bizarre rabbit hole quest of designing my own (probably) 16-bit game console. The controller is maybe done now, on a design level. Like I have parts for everything sourced and a layout for the internal PCB. I don't have a fully tested working prototype yet because I am in the middle of a huge financial crisis and don't have the cash laying around to send out to have boards printed and start rapidly iterating design on the 3D printed bits (housing the scroll wheel is going to be a little tricky). I should really spend my creative energy focusing on software development for a nice little demo ROM (or like, short term projects to earn money I desperately need) but my brain's kinda stuck in circuitry gear so I'm thinking more about what's going into the actual console itself. This may get techie.

So... in the broadest sense, and I think I've mentioned this before, I want to make this a 16-bit system (which is a term with a pretty murky definition), maybe 32-bit? And since I'm going to all this trouble I want to give my project here a little something extra the consoles from that era didn't have. And at the same time, I'd like to be able to act as a bridge for the sort of weirdos who are currently actively making new games for those systems to start working on this, on a level of "if you would do this on this console with this code, here's how you would do it on mine." This makes for a hell of a lot of research on my end, but trust me, it gets worse!

So let's talk about the main strengths of the 2D game consoles everyone knows and loves. Oh and just now while looking for some visual aids maybe I stumbled across this site, which is actually great as a sort of mid-level overview of all this stuff. Short version though-

The SNES (or Super Famicom) does what it does by way of a combination of really going all in on direct memory access, and particularly having a dedicated setup for doing so between scanlines, coupled with a bunch of dedicated graphical modes specialized for different use cases, and you know, that you can switch between partway through drawing a screen. And of course the feature everyone knows and loves where you can have one polygon and do all sorts of fun things with it.

The Genesis (or Megadrive) has an actual proper 16-bit processor instead of this weird upgraded 6502 like the SNES had for a scrapped backwards compatibility plan. It also had this frankly wacky design where they just kinda took the guts out of a Sega Master System and had them off to the side as a segregated system whose only real job is managing the sound chip, one of those good good Yamaha synths with that real distinct sound... oh and they also actually did have a backwards compatibility deal that just kinda used the audio side to emulate an SMS, basically.

The TurboGrafix-16 (or PC Engine) really just kinda went all-in on making its own custom CPU from scratch which...we'll get to that, and otherwise uh... it had some interesting stuff going on sound wise? I feel like the main thing it had going was getting in on CDs early but I'm not messing with optical drives and they're no longer a really great storage option anyway.

Then there's the Neo Geo... where what's going on under the good is just kind of A LOT. I don't have the same handy analysis ready to go on this one, but my understanding is it didn't really go in for a lot of nice streamlining tricks and just kinda powered through. Like it has no separation of background layers and sprites. It's just all sprites. Shove those raw numbers.

So what's the best of all worlds option here? I'd like to go with one of them nice speedy Motorolla processors. The 68000 the Genesis used is no longer manufactured though. The closest still-in-production equivalent would be the 68SEC000 family. Seems like they go for about $15 a pop, have a full 32-bit bus, low voltage, some support clock speeds like... three times what the Genesis did. It's overkill, but should remove any concerns I have about having a way higher resolution than the systems I'm jumping off from. I can also easily throw in some beefy RAM chips where I need.

I was also planning to just directly replicate the Genesis sound setup, weird as it is, but hit the slight hiccup that the Z80 was JUST discontinued, like a month or two ago. Pretty sure someone already has a clone of it, might use that.

Here's where everything comes to a screeching halt though. While the makers of all these systems were making contracts for custom processors to add a couple extra features in that I should be able to work around by just using newer descendant chips that have that built in, there really just is no off the shelf PPU that I'm aware of. EVERYONE back in the day had some custom ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) chip made to assemble every frame of video before throwing it at the TV. Especially the SNES, with all its modes changing the logic there and the HDMA getting all up in those mode 7 effects. Which are again, something I definitely want to replicate here.

So one option here is... I design and order my own ASIC chips. I can probably just fit the entire system in one even? This however comes with two big problems. It's pricy. Real pricy. Don't think it's really practical if I'm not ordering in bulk and this is a project I assume has a really niche audience. Also, I mean, if I'm custom ordering a chip, I can't really rationalize having stuff I could cram in there for free sitting outside as separate costly chips, and hell, if it's all gonna be in one package I'm no longer making this an educational electronics kit/console, so I may as well just emulate the whole thing on like a raspberry pi for a tenth of the cost or something.

The other option is... I commit to even more work, and find a way to reverse engineer all the functionality I want out with some big array of custom ROMs and placeholder RAM and just kinda have my own multi-chip homebrew co-processors? Still PROBABLY cheaper than the ASIC solution and I guess not really making more research work for myself. It's just going to make for a bigger/more crowded motherboard or something.

Oh and I'm now looking at a 5V processor and making controllers compatible with a 10V system so I need to double check that all the components in those don't really care that much and maybe adjust things.

And then there's also FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays). Even more expensive than an ASIC, but the advantage is it's sort of a chip emulator and you can reflash it with something else. So if you're specifically in the MiSTer scene, I just host a file somewhere and you make the one you already have pretend to be this system. So... good news for those people but I still need to actually build something here.

So... yeah that's where all this stands right now. I admit I'm in way way over my head, but I should get somewhere eventually?

[parasitic-inductance]

fading's studyblr

Hey y'all

I'm fading, a computer engineering undergrad

Interested Sectors: SWE, Hardware Development

Languages: C/C++, ARM, VHDL, Java, Python

Hardware Technologies: FPGA, nRF 52840 series

SWE Tools: Git, Linux, PowerShell, Quartus Prime, Keil uVision

I'm interested tracking real progress, especially when it comes to developing progress with projects or learning languages

Follow me for tech talks, progress, and more!

follow me on my main: @fadingintogrey

[govindhtech]

AMD Versal AI Engine: Powering Next-Gen Intelligence

What is Versal AI engine?

The Versal Premium line, which integrates AI Engines, has exceptional adaptive signal processing capability and is designed for the most demanding compute and data transportation applications in wired communications, data center computation, test and measurement, and aerospace and military.

Versal AI Engine

The AI Engine Array Interface may be configured with to the AMD LogiCORE AI Engine IP. Through tiles included in the AI Engine Array Interface, this array is linked to both the Network on Chip and the programmable logic (PL). This IP specifies the clock controlling the AI Engine array and permits the definition of the number of AXI4-Stream and memory-mapped AXI interfaces with their corresponding width and orientation.

Key Features and Benefits

AXI4 configuration interfaces that are memory mapped.

AXI4 master interfaces that are memory mapped.

AXI4-Stream master and slave interfaces having 32, 64, or 128 bit data widths that may be adjusted.

Fast streams may be enabled by choosing to enable registered interfaces.

Programmable logic (PL) stream clocks automatically associate.

Designing AMD Versal AI Engine

Image Credit To AMD

AMD Developing Versal AI Engine with Vitis Model Composer AMD With Vitis Model Composer, algorithms designed for Versal AI Engines may be quickly simulated, explored, and coded from inside the Simulink environment. This may be accomplished by importing kernels and data-flow graphs into Vitis Model Composer as blocks and adjusting the block GUI parameter to control the behavior of the kernels and graphs, or by utilizing the AI Engine library blocks.

Additionally, the tool lets you use a combination of AI Engine and programmable logic (HDL/HLS) blocks to create and simulate a design. By seamlessly integrating Vitis Model Composer AI Engine blocks with Simulink source and sink blocks, simulation results may be viewed.

For usage in the Simulink environment, Vitis Model Composer offers a collection of blocks that are optimized for speed. These consist of:

AI Engine blocks

Image Credit To AMD

Comprises a collection of intricate AI Engine DSP building elements pertaining to mixers, FIR, FFT, and DDS.

includes blocks for importing graphs and kernels that may be directed to Versal devices’ AI Engine section.

HLS (Targeting PL and generates HLS code)

Targeting PL and producing HLS code, HLS provides preset blocks that contain bit-wise operations, logic, linear algebra, and math functional blocks.

Block the import of HLS kernels that are intended for Versal devices’ PL section.

HDL (Produces RTL code and targets PL)

Blocks for modeling and synthesizing DSP, arithmetic, and logic components on an FPGA

contains a FIR Compiler block that targets the Versal design’s specific DSP48E1 and DSP48E2 hardware resources.

Blocks that facilitate communication between the AMD HDL blockset and the AI Engine.

Unleash DSP Compute with AMD Versal AI Engines

For next-generation DSP workloads, speed up demanding high-performance DSP applications.

AMD Versal AI Engine Technology Enables High-Performance Digital Signal Processing (DSP) Requirements

Clients developing next-generation DSP applications need enormous computational power, which conventional FPGA designs cannot effectively provide. Large quantities of DSP blocks and programmable logic resources may be used by compute-intensive DSP applications like FIR, FFT, and General Matrix Multiply.

The total computation capability that conventional programmable logic devices may provide may be greatly diminished by this need. For demanding DSP workloads with stringent power constraints, just expanding the number of DSP blocks and programmable logic available is not a scalable solution.

In these situations, Versal AI Engines are intended to provide a more effective computing solution.

Boost Compute and Use Less Power

Optimize performance and transform your DSP designs.

Did you know that you may increase scalability and efficiency to satisfy the growing needs of high-performance, next-generation DSP applications? Learn 5 strategies to improve your DSP designs using AMD Versal AI Engines.

Access Benchmarks Comparing Versal AI Engines to Previous Programmable Logic Technology

Please get in touch with sales or your FAE for test results and source designs for head-to-head benchmark comparisons between designs that use just Programmable Logic and adaptable SoC + AI Engine designs that use AMD Versal adaptable SoCs.

Get Started with Versal AI Engines for DSP

Increase DSP compute density for the next generation of demanding DSP workloads by speeding up the most demanding high-performance DSP applications.

Read more on govindhtech.com