FPGA ( Field programmable gate array ) April 2008 Prepared by : Muhammad Ziyada Muhammad Al tabakh

Contents Hardware engineers vs software developers FPGA Market History of FPGA Modern developments Architecture Design and programming

Hardware designers vs software developers The hardware engineers roll up their sleeves and work for months without a break software programmers would sit back and relax, or play ping-pong, until the hardware was stable. the hardware design would quickly become a hardware redesign for some perceived deficiency or new feature request

VHDL solution In the early days, circuits as gate-level schematics. saved by (HDLs). allowed us to describe the functionality Allowed design to be quickly and easily represented and simulated

VHDL VHSIC hardware description language developed at the behest of the US Department of Defense alternative to huge, complex manuals which were subject to implementation-specific details logic simulators were developed to read the VHDL files logic synthesis tools that read the VHDL

FPGA market FPGA Market Will Reach $2.75 Billion by Decade’s End

FPGA market January 2008 Celoxica Holdings has agreed the $3m sale of its electronic system level (ESL) business to US firm Catalytic. With this move, we can synthesize the top two languages for high-level algorithm development — C and MATLAB — and deliver both software and hardware implementations

FPGA market Aerospace & Defense Automotive Broadcast Consumer Data Processing and Storage Industrial / Scientific / Medical Wired Communications Wireless Communications

FPGA market

Brief history the invention of the very first computers in the 1940's and 1950's A Xilinx co-founder, Ross Freeman, invented the field programmable gate array in 1984 FPGA come after many earlier devices

Modern development Configurable Logic Blocks Registers (flip flops) for fast data storage. Logic Routing Input/Output Blocks Basic pin logic (flip flops, muxs, etc) Block Ram Internal memory for data storage Digital Clock Managers Clock distribution Programmable Routing Matrix

"Pros" and "Cons" Pros Low power consumption; ideal for portable electronics devices. Upgradeable using software, instead of extensive hardware replacement. Low cost of overhead. Sometimes replaces as many as twenty traditional PALs. Parallel computing possibilities.

Cons High cost of fabricating a completely new chip Size constraints / limitations More difficult to code & debug Many applications still are, and may remain, in the theoretical phase "Pros" and "Cons"

FPGA vs classical architecture Classical operation Fetch an instruction Fetch a piece of data Fetch another piece of data Perform an operation Store the result : Do the same thing all over again

FPGA vs classical architecture y = (a * b) + (c * d) + (e * f) + (g * h); the multiplications are performed in parallel without the need to fetch and decode the instructions. This results in orders-of- magnitude speed improvement.

FPGA vs conventional circuit 80’s90’sNow

The rise of FPGA The first devices were primitive diode matrices used in TV channel selectors, HAM radio tuners, emerging defense and space applications. replaced by more capable logic devices based on arrays of combinatorial gates dramatic change in reprogram ability, more flexible interconnect architectures.

The rise of FPGA Programmable Logic Arrays (PLA)

The rise of FPGA Programmable Array Logic (PAL)

The rise of FPGA Complex PLDs (CPLDs)

The rise of FPGA Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs)

Main vendors Xilinx spartan and vertix series ise webback software Altera cyclon series Quartus software Mentor Graphic FPGAdv software

FPGA design skip

FPGA design

FPGA programming Languages HDL languages ( VHDL and VERILOG ) Truth table Block diagram Schematic diagram Flowchart State machine And more

VHDL code LIBRARY ieee ; USE ieee.std_logic_1164.all ; ENTITY mux2to1 IS PORT ( w0, w1, s : IN STD_LOGIC ; f : OUT STD_LOGIC ) ; END mux2to1 ; ARCHITECTURE Behavior OF mux2to1 IS BEGIN PROCESS ( w0, w1, s ) BEGIN IF s = '0' THEN f <= w0 ; ELSE f <= w1 ; END IF ; END PROCESS ; END Behavior ;;

Soft cores MicroBlaze,PowerPC,Nios,… soft processor create complete systems composed of, for example, an 8- or 16-bit controller, a UART, and other such I/O devices on a single programmable chip

Soft processor

References Practical FPGA Programming in C By David Pellerin, Scott Thibault Ece230 vhdl lectures By Khurram Waheed VHDL cookbook By peter j.ashenden

Thank you Muhammad ziyada Muhammad al tabakh