Warning, I’m a less than one month beginner in Verilog, Verilator et FPGA, studied as a hobby, if there are some mistakes I will correct it. You can contact me on The Fediverse.
Table of Content
* Introduction
** Real world full process
** Things to know and understand
** How to code a FPGA
* Verilog
** Values
** Types
** Gates
** Modules
** Simple example, writing an “and” gate
** Initial and always blocks
* Simple example with Verilator
** Make the test with Verilator
** Tracing example and GTKWave
** About Verilator examples
** Basic practical example with Verilator
* Further reading
The text in strong are here to help diagonal reading.
Introduction
Still continue to go to lower layers with the world of FPGA (Field Processors Gateway Array). This is a reprogrammable development electronic tool used to build and test processor. After the processor is validated in FPGA, you can start to build ASIC (Application-specific integrated circuit), actual hardwired processors that we use every-days in our computing devices. FPGA are also used as is in several industrial appliance (avionics, audio or video processing, etc…) for their parallelism, so the fact they are faster than a general purpose ASIC and a piece of software in these cases, and the ability to update them easily in case of problem. This post is a little introduction about FPGA, the popular IEEE standard Verilog HDL (“Hardware description language”) language and how to test it with free and open source software (FOSS) Verilator simulator. If you want to use VHDL, GHDL is FOSS simulator for VHDL.
