Gadget Factory

VHDL Tutorial

  • How To Control What You See On A Screen in Two Hours and For Less Than $25!

    Imagine how cool it would be to control what appears on your screen and at a bargain price, just using your FPGA (yes! Your Papilio!) and some other easy-to-get components. All you need is read today´s article (and buy the tiny things of course). This how-to post is one of those which are written thinking…

  • VHDL 101: Beginner’s Guide To VHDL

    Paul Clark from Design Spark has a great wiki on VHDL 101 – Combinational Logic that we thought we’d repost here to give those of you that are new to VHDL kind of a kick start.  This one is actually the follow-up to his first article titled What Is VHDL that has some great explanations of…

  • VHDL Tutorials With Mike Field

    Happy New Year!  2012 is the year that the Mayans predicted would be the end of the world, or some such rot.  Don’t worry, we don’t believe in this at all.  We believe in hard science.  But if you believe, then there’s not much time left – so why not get started with some FPGA goodness? Papilio enthusiast…

  • Tutorial: Simulate AVR8 and Custom User Cores

    NOTE: Please note that the tutorial does not show that you must select “Gadget Factory Papilio Custom Board” under tools/board in the Arduino IDE for the simulation file to be generated. This screencast shows how to simulate a custom user core connected to the AVR8 Soft Processor. Simulation is the most efficient way to debug…

  • Tutorial: Custom User cores in the AVR8 Soft Processor.

    This screencast provides instructions for downloading and synthesizing a custom AVR8 soft processor for use with a version of the Arduino IDE that has been modified for use with the Papilio. Prerequisites: AVR8 Source Code Arduino IDE modified for the Papilio. Xilinx ISE free “Webpack” version. Custom User Core sketch. Related Simulate your custom AVR8…

  • Tutorial: Custom AVR8 Soft Processor for use with Arduino IDE. (V1.2)

    This screencast provides instructions for downloading and synthesizing a custom AVR8 soft processor for use with a version of the Arduino IDE that has been modified for use with the Papilio. Prerequisites: AVR8 Source Code Arduino IDE modified for the Papilio. Xilinx ISE free “Webpack” version. Part 1: Downloading the AVR8 source code. Selecting only…

  • How-to debug internal FPGA Logic with the $50 Openbench Logic Sniffer.

    This tutorial shows how to use the $50 OpenBench Logic Sniffer to debug internal FPGA logic. Debugging internal FPGA logic can be pretty challenging and time consuming, a lot can be done using simulation but when you have logic that interacts with the outside world debugging can come to a grinding halt. The traditional solution…

  • Xilinx VHDL UART Example

    Here is a three part screencast that provides an example of implementing a high speed 3Mb/s UART with the Papilio One board and the FT2232 USB chip.   The project uses the free Xilinx VHDL UART example because it is optimized for Xilinx hardware, it provides the smallest and fastest UART possible. The source code…