Best FPGA development practices – Whitepaper

This whitepaper by Charles Fulk and RC Cofer is an excellent summary of several techniques, tools and design guidelines for FPGA: FPGA design process Revision control Coding guidelines Scripting automation PCB design for FPGA VHDL capture and simulation (including OS-VVM package) Project Management Design Resources The whitepaper is available here

MIF_Gen – A Matlab Utility

Many times I find myself in the need of generating data for testing. We need data for verification, either done on simulation or on the real target. One easy way to test our system is to generate data vectors on RAM. Altera RAM IP includes the ability to initialize RAM contents during power-up by means … Continue reading MIF_Gen – A Matlab Utility

VHDL editors – Notepad++

A good VHDL editor is terribly important during all the phases of your design cycle. Both Altera Quartus and Modelsim simulator include their own VHDL editors. Both tools include syntax highlighting. In the case of Altera Quartus editor, there is a very useful feature which is the possibility of entering templates for commonly used code … Continue reading VHDL editors – Notepad++