![]() Read button, update LED, read button, update LED, and so on. This would keep happening over and over in a loop. ![]() If you were to do this with a microcontroller, such as an Arduino or Raspberry Pi, the code to do this would read the button input, and if it is pressed, turn the LED on, and otherwise turn it off. To make this a little clearer, let’s look at something that could be done with either an FPGA or a microcontroller: turning on an LED when you press a button. When you are working with FPGAs, you are designing hardware, not software. Because of this, people have started turning to FPGAs to accelerate tasks by creating custom hardware. However, in recent years, even though Moore’s law continues, processor performance has largely stalled with the extra transistors being used to cram more cores into a single chip. It used to be that if you wanted to improve the performance of an application, you simply bought or waited for a faster processor. ![]() You can have many stages in the line that are all working at the same time, independent of one another.įPGAs have been becoming more popular recently and have started appearing in more mainstream news. You can tailor it specifically for the exact job it needs to do. An FPGA, on the other hand, is like an assembly line. However, people can really focus on only one thing at a time, and unfortunately, we have only two hands. You can teach someone to do almost any task, and his arms and hands are capable of manipulating basically anything. An analogy that I particularly like is to think of a microcontroller as a person. This is especially true for people coming from a background of working with boards such as the Arduino or Raspberry Pi. You can find more information and order your own from Embedded Micro.įPGAs Versus Microcontrollers: A ComparisonįPGAs and microcontrollers are often compared. It is a great board for working through example projects. It features 4 7-segment LED digits (like the display on your microwave), 24 LEDs, 24 switches, and 5 buttons. The IO Shield, shown in Figure 1-2 is an add-on board that stacks on top of the Mojo. ![]() You can find more information and order the Mojo from Embedded Micro. You can connect an external power supply and the USB port at the same time, as the USB port is protected by a diode. The supplied power should be between 4.8 V–12 V, with 5 V being the recommended voltage. Power can be supplied via the USB port, the barrel jack, the two holes, or the RAW input on the large headers. The I/O on the Mojo is all at 3.3 V and is not 5 V tolerant. Beyond the other bare necessities such as a 50 MHz oscillator, the Mojo features eight LEDs and a button (commonly used as a reset). However, once the FPGA is programmed, the microcontroller can be used as an ADC (eight analog inputs are broken out) and a USB-to-serial interface for your FPGA designs. The Mojo also has an Arduino-compatible microcontroller whose main function is to program the FPGA over USB. With a working environment, we will work through a basic project that will turn on an LED when a button is pressed. You can do with this with VirtualBox and Ubuntu, both of which are free. Unfortunately, Macs are not supported by Xilinx’s tools, but you can work through a virtual machine running a compatible operating system. We will also walk you through all the steps to set up the necessary software on Windows or Linux. In this chapter, we will explain a little more about what FPGAs are and what they are good at. You can reconfigure the FPGA as many times as you want, and each time it will become the new circuit without needing to physically change anything! A more detailed description of how this all works is covered later. This works by configuring small blocks (known as slices) to perform logic functions and connecting them together to implement your larger design. These devices allow you to design a digital circuit, and the device will become that circuit. An FPGA belongs to a family of devices known as programmable logic devices. ![]() Unless you already know what all that means, it is still not very helpful, so let’s break it down a little more. That mouthful is simply trying to tell you that you can program an FPGA over and over (field programmable) and that it is more or less just a large array of logic gates (gate array). FPGA stands for field programmable gate array. ![]()
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