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FPGA's powering data centers, AI

FPGA’s powering data centers, AI

A few years ago FPGA did not have the superstar status that it enjoys today. NASA did have FPGA’s on-board the Mars rover but the usage of FPGA was not ubiquitous like today. After the success seen in High Frequency/Low Latency Trading platforms powered by FPGAs, the data centers market is flooded with FPGA based solutions.

Intel’s acquisition of FPGA-maker Altera…

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Xilinx Creates Worlds Fastest, Densest, DSP Rich FPGA and Shipping Now

SemiWiki – Xilinx Creates Worlds Fastest, Densest, DSP Rich FPGA and Shipping Now.

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FPGA 101 – Making awesome stuff with FPGAs

FPGA 101 – Making awesome stuff with FPGAs http://wp.me/s2Qwwg-fpga101

Here’s a nice introductory video on FPGA’s. Do have a look.

Thanks “Dangerous Prototypes”

http://dangerousprototypes.com/2013/12/31/30c3-video-fpga-101-making-awesome-stuff-with-fpgas/

Happy Holidays, Happy New Year

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Linting

Linting http://wp.me/s2Qwwg-linting

As we move towards larger designs with 1000+ lines of code, RTL code review process starts to get tedious. Here’s where linting comes in.

A Linting tool performs a thorough analysis on RTL code. It performs checks based on a set of rules and returns a…

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#FPGA #Lint #Linting

FPMM - FPGA-Based Prototyping Methodology Manual

FPMM – FPGA-Based Prototyping Methodology Manual

Click on the above link to download FPGA-Based Prototyping Methodology Manual.

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#Ebooks #FPGA #Prototyping

Fast Fourier Transforms & Chipscope

Many of you working in signal processing would be using Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT). This post…

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FPGA Design Flow

Taken from an excellent introductory book on FPGA’s titled “FPGA’s Now What“

Image Courtesy of…

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FPGA Synthesis for Dummies

Introduction

Generic definition of Synthesis by Princeton University dictionary

The combination of ideas into a complex whole.

Even our FPGA synthesis tool does exactly that.

It combines our ideas (logic description) written in HDL into macros available…

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VHDL Edge Detection - Rising Edge vs Tick Event

Edge detection is widely used to detect clock edges. Data transfer happens during the rising and…

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Is System Verilog useful for FPGA Design ?

I’m sure there are many FPGA Designers who are intrigued by System Verilog & its use for FPGA Design.

I recently bumped into this article regarding System Verilog for FPGA Design. This paper is NOTa tutorial on System Verilog, it is a survey and the…

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Carrer in FPGA : India

I’ve seen a lot of forums where students undergoing undergraduate courses and fresh graduates in Electronics ask queries related to entry into VLSI/FPGA domain.

I recently stumbled across this article titled “How to Get Into FPGA” by Electronics For You…

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Electronic Voting Machines using FPGA

This is an interesting subject to make Voting tamper proof. Such real-world applications reaching the common-man would make FPGA’s more popular. Click on link below.

Keeping Voting Honest Through FPGAs | FPGA Gurus.

(more…)

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I've paralleled 'FPGA Blog' to a new address hosted by Wordpress to increase outreach.

Do visit http://fpgaconcepts.wordpress.com/

I'll continue to duplicate posts in both the blogs.

#Blog #Wordpress #FPGA Concepts

Hilbert Transform in FPGA

Introduction

Most of you familiar with signal processing would’ve heard the term Hilbert Transform. We’ll call it HT from here on. There are other transform in DSP like Laplace, Fourier, Z etc which are more popular & used across multiple domains. Basically transform, as the word suggests is a mathematical process which converts one form of signal to another. Some are used only for purely analytic purposes (Fourier) while some are used for real-time signal processing like Hilbert.

HT ‘transforms’ the phase of the signal. It performs a phase shift of -90°. Yes you read it right, it is negative 90° phase shift. Generally, it is mentioned as a 90° phase shift without explicitly mentioning positive or negative shift. The reason is due to the concept of positive & negative frequencies. HT would phase shift positive frequency component by -90° while a negative frequency would be shifted by +90°.

Where could we use HT?

I’m sure there are multiple uses but the one I’m aware of is Quadrature processing. The term quadrature processing refers to dealing with In-phase, Quadrature-phase signals, i.e I,Q signals. I,Q signals are used for modulation & demodulation techniques. Quadrature modulation/demodulation offers many advantages over conventional approaches which can be discussed in another post.

For example, SSB demodulation by phasing method uses Hilbert transform to phase shift the incoming modulated signal to -90°.

FPGA Implementation (Xilinx)

Hilbert transformers can be easily implemented in Xilinx FPGA’s using FIR compiler IP. HT coefficients can be generated using Matlab FDA Tool. It is important to note that the Hilbert coefficient structure should contain alternate zeroes for FIR compiler to infer the filter as a Hilbert Structure.

Snapshot shows Hilbert Transformer using FDA Tool.

Generated Coefficients for Hilbert transformer

As you can see, every alternate coefficient is zero valued, which the FIR compiler infers as a Hilbert Filter structure.

FIR IP Core generates I, Q output (dout_i, dout_q in IP symbol) if the Hilbert structure is inferred properly. The output is -90° phase shifted. HT of cosine is sine and HT of sine is -cosine

HT is predominantly used in quadrature Signal Processing.

#Hilbert Transform #DSP #FPGA #FIR

FPGA FFT Architectures

This post has deliberately come after a long gap as there are other blogs like the recently launched Programmable Planet which is far superior in content and substance.

Fast Fourier Transforms are almost ubiquitous for anyone dealing with signal processing & communications systems. Time domain analysis doesn't provide us much required information as signal processing mostly relies on frequency domain techniques like modulation, up/downconversion, filtering. In short FFT is required in almost every design for either on-line or off-line analysis. For example, Peak search/scan is generally performed in spectral domain.

Xilinx Fast Fourier Transform IP Core provides 4 architectures. There is obviously a trade-off between speed (performance) & area.

I've considered an example of 64k (65536) transform length clocked at 100 MSPS & target data rate of 100 MSPS. Table shows the theoretical latency & resource estimates provided by Xilinx IP core.

From the table, the trade-off vis-a-vis FPGA Architectures is clear.

#FFT #DSP #Xilinx #DSP Slice #BRAM #Fast Fourier Transform #FFT IP

Random trivia about Computing

We know some computers use 64-bit words.

2^64 is approximately 1.8 x 10^18 - that's a pretty large number.

So in fact if we started incrementing a 64-bit counter once per second at the beginning of the universe (20 billion yrs ago), the MSB's of the counter would still be all zeroes.

~ Excerpts from a book on Digital Signal Processing

#DSP #Computing #Trivia #Fact #random fact #64-bit #counter

Website for FPGA Developers

There is limited & scattered knowledge available in the programmable logic space online. I recently stumbled upon Programmable Planet, a website dedicated to Programmable Devices.

Programmable planet is undoubtedly emerging as the best online resource for "all things programmable" as they call it. It has FPGA, VHDL concepts explained by industry experts - now that's something new. These experts are very much active in the website & available for comments/clarifications.

If you haven't gone through Programmable Planet, I suggest you do it right away.

Here's the permalink --> http://bit.ly/MTNMAR

#Programmable Planet #FPGA #VHDL #VLSI #PLD #Programmable Logic

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