Build Your Own Digitized Tic Tac Toe with FPGA

Greetings FPGA enthusiasts! Today’s project is a rather exciting one where we will attempt to build a Digitized Version of the popular Tic Tac Toe game with FPGA. This Tic Tac Toe FPGA implementation is pretty simple so this is a great project for a newbie too. So game on!

The Hardware requirements are pretty decent and the cost of this project is quite affordable. The things you will need are breadboards, buttons, LEDs (preferably 3 colors), jumper cables and the your FPGA board.

The entire project is based upon how to build a single LED controller with FPGA, and once you do master this, you can extend it to building your conventional 3×3 array. Once you build a multi LED controller, simply interface them with the FPGA using a XOR network as the author has described. Follow the given steps for interconnections and take care while using the PMOD port since the author did lose a few LEDs to it!

Once the interfacing part is done, you can start programming in VHDL (.vhd) to code the victory conditions. An interesting thing is that these conditions are coded only using 2 “if” loops, but they are substantial in size. An interesting challenge in the project will be to code for “tie” cases. A separate module has been used by the author to reduce the complexity in the code and make it easily decipherable.

If you would like to jump right into the game you can download the zip file in step 10 and implement it using VHDL and the .bit file using Adept. The codes have been well segregated into modules and are pretty easy to understand even if you are new to the FPGA world! Simply wire the components as shown, and download the code into your FPGA board to start gaming.

By RyanFrawley