VHDL book

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lance
Posts: 6
Joined: Sat Jul 27, 2013 12:23 pm

VHDL book

Post by lance »

For those interested in working on the FPGA or just interpreting what has been done , I've become quite fond of this book that is freely downloadable:
http://www.freerangefactory.org/site/pm ... Main/Books

There are quite a few others out there but this might be a new favorite.

Lance
bpadalino
Posts: 303
Joined: Mon Mar 04, 2013 4:53 pm

Re: VHDL book

Post by bpadalino »

This is great. A few notes on the VHDL design.

The design is currently a bit "hacky". Top levels should pretty much just instantiate other components. It shouldn't really hold as much logic as we have here.

We are using a feature of VHDL which allows multiple architectures (read: implementations) of a particular entity (read: interface). This allows the top level pinout to stay the same between projects, while the guts are all changed around. We envision this to be very powerful by allowing users to put in their own modems and providing a basic skeleton without much overhead. Essentially it's as bare bones we can get it without needing people to know every last detail of setting up the tools.

The way this is managed is through the use of Revisions in Altera's Quartus II tool. Each revision is a different implementation of the top level. To go ahead making your own, you can copy a revision into your own revision, and then change things around. The caveat here is to note that if you edit any VHDL - it WILL edit the original VHDL file so you need to make a copy manually if you don't want to muck with the original revision.

As usual, feel free to post questions here. I hope to encourage the FPGA hacking side of things as the basic software gets more stable and requires less attention. My personal opinion is that the FPGA is where SDR magic really shines and happens.
Hubert
Posts: 1
Joined: Mon Jan 29, 2024 12:17 am

Re: VHDL book

Post by Hubert »

I know this topic is old, I'm interested in this book, but it seems the link is broken, can you provide the link again?
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