Fundamental Digital Design with FPGA: An Experimental Discovery of Digital Circuit Design

Fundamental Digital Design with FPGA: An Experimental Discovery of Digital Circuit Design

As one of the most demanding technology in electronics hardware engineering, FPGAs serve all purposes for digital design and play a key role in many advanced applications such as video & image processing, IC design function validation, aerospace & defense, telecom communications… However, one major challenge we face now is that most FPGAs including various types of FPGA development boards are designed for advanced users. Beginners often find extremely challenging or simply get lost when dealing with all sorts of hardware configurations and environmental setup for the boards. If my statistics was correct, most people first heard of FPGAs in colleges while learning computer architecture or digital circuit design. Regardless the invisible high technology behind, FPGA is just a tool and the essence of learning is more about digital design. To take our first step, we always start from the basic concepts of Logic Gates and can eventually go with complex techniques such as Direct Digital Synthesis, digital modulation/demodulation, microprocessor design. Having undergone a painful learning process in school where a team of guys sitting in front of an expensive and complex FPGA board with no idea how it is related to the concepts taught in the lecture, I realized that an efficient way of learning is by examples and people do need to get things work first before throwing them with lots of equations and theories. With this philosophy, we designed a neat and compact FPGA board, along with this illustrative tutorial with a big emphasis on the practical engineering experiments and project building. The goal of this learning kit aims to help beginners take their first baby step to uncover the beauty behind digital design. I am sure there are lots of rooms to improve on this project, and mistakes or imperfections may occur here and there in this book. But I would acknowledge the great value and efforts invested on this whole project by EIM and STEP, particularly the FPGA engineers who contributed so many tested Verilog codes, the IT developers who designed and maintained the operation of WebIDE tool and the Graphics designers who managed the style and formatting of the book. As a growing team with sense of missions, we plan to publish a series of more diverse tutorials and projects covering different applications and levels of complexity. By the moment you read this book, our team sincerely wish you enjoy a pleasant learning experience with this STEPFPGA board.