Gadget Factory

Knowledge Base

  • Experimental CPU Project On FPGA

    Victor over at FPGA Related has an inventive new CPU project that he’s been working on and running on an FPGA.  In his article, Victor shares his design, implementation notes, and code for a different kind of CPU – featuring a novel token machine that resolves an 8-bit token to pretty much any address in…

  • In-Fabric Serialization: 1080p DVI-D With a Spartan 6 LX FPGA

    Mike Field, best known as “hamster” came up with an innovative way to display 1080p video at 60Hz from a Spartan 6 LX FPGA. It really came down to a workaround solution given the transmission speeds of the board vs. what is reqired for 1080p video at 60Hz. Mike explains: So how did Mike get…

  • Cray-1 Supercomputer Recreated On FPGA

    FPGA Cray 1-A (left) and the original Cray-1 supercomputer (right) Self-described “computational necromancer” Chris Fenton lives up to this description given his penchant for recreating classic computer hardware using FPGAs. With the assistance of the original design documents, reference manuals, and the like Chris recreated the iconic 1976 Cray-1 supercomputer on a Xilinx Spartan-3E 1600…

  • Nine Digit Problem Solved In 2.2 ms The FPGA Way

    Here’s the problem: The folks over at Programmable Gatorade wanted to take this classic math problem and put their Altera Cyclone IV FPGA board to use in solving it. The design uses the board’s 50MHz clock and finds the solution in approximately 2.2ms. There are three main components to the design: a module to calculate…

  • DIY “Via Press” An Elegant Solution To An Irritating Problem

    When designing double-sided PCBs, Retromaster kept running into the same annoying problem:  how in the world do I set my vias without them sticking out too much?  A via must protrude from the board only very little, otherwise it cannot be placed under an IC.  So placing copper wire in the via hole and soldering both ends is…

  • HDMI Hacking – Great Information About Tapping Into HDMI

    We recently got word of an intriguing hack that lets you bust into an HDMI cable to sniff out the HDMI protocols for interesting data such as control information and the HDCP security keys. Adam over at Aperture Labs put out a great article at his blog showing exactly how to do this.  First of all, you’ll need…

  • Some Thoughts On Mixing Digital Audio

    Mixing audio in the digital realm has some inherent limitations.  These limitations become more pronounced the less data there is to work with (i.e. low sample rates etc.). We found an article by software developer and author Viktor T. Toth that addresses some of these issues. In real life, when you hear audio from two…

  • How To: Using State Machines With FPGAs

    We found a great article by Adam Taylor (Principal Engineer, EADS Astrium) that illustrates in detail how to implement state machines with your FPGA board. For anyone that is interested, Mr. Taylor provides a comprehensive tutorial on using the two classes of state machines (Moore and Mealy), state machine definitions, state machine encoding, and much…