原创 The MCU guru's guide to FPGAs

 2015-5-22 17:58  1350 12 12 分类: 消费电子

A lot of my friends have a microcontroller (MCU) background and have only a vague idea as to what an FPGA is and what it does.

When pressed, they might say something like "You can configure an FPGA to do different things," but they really have no clue as to what's inside an FPGA or how one might be used in a design.

Similarly, they have typically heard about hardware design languages (HDLs) like Verilog and VHDL; they understand that hardware design engineers use these languages to capture the design intent; but... that's typically about the extent of their knowledge.

Actually, it's only when you try to explain all of this stuff that you realize just how confusing it can be to the uninitiated. Like the fact that things can happen at the same time in the physical hardware world, so we hardware designers tend to tell people that traditional programming languages like C/C++ are inherently sequential in nature while our HDLs are concurrent.

But what does this really mean? HDL source code is just that -- source code -- it's only when we feed it into a tool like a simulator that it acts in a concurrent manner, or when we pass it to a synthesis tool that generates a configuration file that is loaded into an FPGA that then functions in a concurrent manner. How about the fact that the simulator and synthesis tools themselves will be written in conventional programming languages like C/C++, which we just said were inherently sequential in nature?

The thing is that we hardware guys and gals know how all this works "in our bones" and we don’t understand why MCU guys and software weenies don't (LOL).

Anyway, the reason I'm waffling on about this here is that I've just written a couple of articles:

It would be great if you could find the time to bounce over there, give these a read, and then let me know if I've answered most of the questions or confused the issue further. Also, please let me know if there's anything you think I've missed out.