Gadget Factory

The Basics You’ll Need To Start Hacking With FPGAs

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hoppasaurus

It’s well known that FPGAs can be difficult to get started with, to the point of being downright intimidating.  We’re always on the lookout for information that can help make the learning curve a little less… curvy.   Today we’ve got an easy-to-follow information compilation for understanding FPGAs and how they work, courtesy of FPGAhacker.  Let’s just call it some background info that everyone who is looking to get into FPGA hacking will need to understand.

Some of the key knowledge for learning FPGAs includes Boolean algebra, circuitry, combinational logic, and all the binary you can handle.  Thankfully, FPGAhacker has addressed each of these concepts and how they are used in an FPGA as a whole.  Even if you are a veteran FPGA hacker, it’s still worth a quick review session.

A Field Programmable Gate Array is a Gate Array ASIC that has a matrix of metallization laid out already on the silicon, but the connections between the stripes of metal aren’t electrically connected yet. There are a number of ways these connections can be made, and the exact nature is going to be proprietary. The act of making these connections is called programming, as you may have gathered from the name. Depending on the type of the FPGA, the act of programming can be a permanent one time act. More often, the connections are temporary, and the FPGA makes use of a memory such as SRAM or flash, to store the connection information (referred to as the FPGAs configuration).

So there ya go! Here’s the link: Getting Into FPGA Hacking Series, parts 1 – 4.

(via FPGAhacker)

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