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What is an FPGA?

It's a programmable electronic circuit, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_gate_array

A hierarchy of programmable interconnects allows the logic blocks of an FPGA to be interconnected as needed by the system designer, somewhat like a one-chip programmable breadboard. These logic blocks and interconnects can be programmed after the manufacturing process by the customer/designer (hence the term "field programmable", i.e. programmable in the field) so that the FPGA can perform whatever logical function is needed.

FPGAs are generally slower than their application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) counterparts, as they can't handle as complex a design, and draw more power. However, they have several advantages such as a shorter time to market, ability to re-program in the field to fix bugs, and lower non-recurring engineering costs. Vendors can sell cheaper, less flexible versions of their FPGAs which cannot be modified after the design is committed. The development of these designs is made on regular FPGAs and then migrated into a fixed version that more resembles an ASIC. Complex programmable logic devices, or CPLDs, are another alternative.

What is VHDL?

Is a a design-entry language for field-programmable gate arrays and application-specific integrated circuits in electronic design automation of digital circuits, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHDL

VHDL borrows heavily from the Ada (programming language) in both concepts (for example, the slice notation for indexing part of a one-dimensional array) and syntax. VHDL has constructs to handle the parallelism inherent in hardware designs, but these constructs (processes) differ in syntax from the parallel constructs in Ada (tasks). Like Ada, VHDL is strongly-typed and case insensitive. There are many features of VHDL which are not found in Ada.

The initial version of VHDL, designed to IEEE standard 1076-1987, included a wide range of data types, including numerical (integer and real), logical (bit and boolean), character and time, plus arrays of bit called bit_vector and of character called string.

How to use them the GNU way ?

FPGA (last edited 2008-06-26 09:51:44 by anonymous)