FPGA Simulation: A Complete Step-by-Step Guide shows FPGA design engineers how to avoid long lab debug sessions by simulating with SystemVerilog. The book helps engineers to have never simulated their designs before by bringing them through seven steps that can be added incrementally to a design flow. Engineers start with code coverage as the first step. Succeeding steps introduce test planning, assertions, and SystemVerilog simuation techniques. By the end of the process engineers who have never simulated before will know how to create complete self-checking test benches that generate their own stimulus, and demonstrate complete functional coverage. This book is a must for engineers who are facing DO-254 certification requirements on their next FPGA project.
To date, the most common form of simulators of computer systems are software-based running on standard computers. One promising approach to improve simulation performance is to apply hardware, specifically reconfigurable hardware in the form of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). This manuscript describes various approaches of using FPGAs to accelerate software-implemented simulation of computer systems and selected simulators that incorporate those techniques. More precisely, we describe a simulation architecture taxonomy that incorporates a simulation architecture specifically designed for FPGA accelerated simulation, survey the state-of-the-art in FPGA-accelerated simulation, and describe in detail selected instances of the described techniques. Table of Contents: Preface / Acknowledgments / Introduction / Simulator Background / Accelerating Computer System Simulators with FPGAs / Simulation Virtualization / Categorizing FPGA-based Simulators / Conclusion / Bibliography / Authors' Biographies
This book introduces the FPGA technology used in the laboratory sessions, and provides a step-by-step guide for designing and simulation of digital circuits. It utilizes the VHDL language, which is one of the most common language used to describe the design of digital systems. The Quartus II, Xilinx ISE 14.7 and ModelSim software are used to process the VHDL code and make simulations, and then the Altera and Xilinx FPGA platforms are employed to implement the simulated digital designs. The book is composed of four parts. The first part of this book has two chapters and covers various aspects: FPGA architectures, ASIC vs FPGA comparison, FPGA design flow and basic VHDL concepts necessary to describe the design of digital systems. The second part of the book includes three chapters that deal with the design of digital circuits such as combinational logic circuits, sequential logic circuits and finite state machines. The third part of the book is reserved for laboratory projects carried out on the FPGA platform. It is a largely hands-on lab class for design digital circuits and implementing their designs on the Altera FPGA platform. Finally, the fourth part of this work is devoted to recent applications carried out on FPGAs, in particular advanced techniques in renewable energy systems. The book is primarily intended for students, scholars, and industrial practitioners interested in the design of modern digital systems.
Skip the complexity and learn to program FPGAs the easy way through this hands-on, beginner-friendly introduction to digital circuit design with Verilog and VHDL. Whether you have been toying with field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) for years or are completely new to these reprogrammable devices, this book will teach you to think like an FPGA engineer and develop reliable designs with confidence. Through detailed code examples, patient explanations, and hands-on projects, Getting Started with FPGAs will actually get you started. Russell Merrick, creator of the popular blog Nandland.com, will guide you through the basics of digital logic, look-up tables, and flip-flops, as well as high-level concepts like state machines. You’ll explore the fundamentals of the FPGA build process including simulation, synthesis, and place and route.You’ll learn about key FPGA primitives, such as DSP blocks and PLLs, and examine how FPGAs handle math operations and I/O. Code examples are provided in both Verilog and VHDL, making the book a valuable resource no matter your language of choice. You’ll discover how to: Implement common design building blocks like multiplexers, LFSRs, and FIFOs Cross between clock domains without triggering metastable conditions or timing errors Avoid common pitfalls when performing math Transmit and receive data at lightning speeds using SerDes Write testbench code to verify your designs are working With this accessible, hands-on guide, you’ll be creating your own functional FPGA projects in no time. Getting started with FPGAs has never been easier.
Richard Munden demonstrates how to create and use simulation models for verifying ASIC and FPGA designs and board-level designs that use off-the-shelf digital components. Based on the VHDL/VITAL standard, these models include timing constraints and propagation delays that are required for accurate verification of today's digital designs. ASIC and FPGA Verification: A Guide to Component Modeling expertly illustrates how ASICs and FPGAs can be verified in the larger context of a board or a system. It is a valuable resource for any designer who simulates multi-chip digital designs.*Provides numerous models and a clearly defined methodology for performing board-level simulation.*Covers the details of modeling for verification of both logic and timing. *First book to collect and teach techniques for using VHDL to model "off-the-shelf" or "IP" digital components for use in FPGA and board-level design verification.
The push to move products to market as quickly and cheaply as possible is fiercer than ever, and accordingly, engineers are always looking for new ways to provide their companies with the edge over the competition. Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), which are faster, denser, and more cost-effective than traditional programmable logic devices (PLDs), are quickly becoming one of the most widespread tools that embedded engineers can utilize in order to gain that needed edge. FPGAs are especially popular for prototyping designs, due to their superior speed and efficiency. This book hones in on that rapid prototyping aspect of FPGA use, showing designers exactly how they can cut time off production cycles and save their companies money drained by costly mistakes, via prototyping designs with FPGAs first. Reading it will take a designer with a basic knowledge of implementing FPGAs to the "next-level of FPGA use because unlike broad beginner books on FPGAs, this book presents the required design skills in a focused, practical, example-oriented manner. - In-the-trenches expert authors assure the most applicable advice to practicing engineers - Dual focus on successfully making critical decisions and avoiding common pitfalls appeals to engineers pressured for speed and perfection - Hardware and software are both covered, in order to address the growing trend toward "cross-pollination" of engineering expertise
This book is both a tutorial and a reference for engineers who use the SystemVerilog Hardware Description Language (HDL) to design ASICs and FPGAs. The book shows how to write SystemVerilog models at the Register Transfer Level (RTL) that simulate and synthesize correctly, with a focus on proper coding styles and best practices. SystemVerilog is the latest generation of the original Verilog language, and adds many important capabilities to efficiently and more accurately model increasingly complex designs. This book reflects the SystemVerilog-2012/2017 standards. This book is for engineers who already know, or who are learning, digital design engineering. The book does not present digital design theory; it shows how to apply that theory to write RTL models that simulate and synthesize correctly. The creator of the original Verilog Language, Phil Moorby says about this book (an excerpt from the book's Foreword): "Many published textbooks on the design side of SystemVerilog assume that the reader is familiar with Verilog, and simply explain the new extensions. It is time to leave behind the stepping-stones and to teach a single consistent and concise language in a single book, and maybe not even refer to the old ways at all! If you are a designer of digital systems, or a verification engineer searching for bugs in these designs, then SystemVerilog will provide you with significant benefits, and this book is a great place to learn the design aspects of SystemVerilog."
Simulation of computer architectures has made rapid progress recently. The primary application areas are hardware/software performance estimation and optimization as well as functional and timing verification. Recent, innovative technologies such as retargetable simulator generation, dynamic binary translation, or sampling simulation have enabled widespread use of processor and system-on-chip (SoC) simulation tools in the semiconductor and embedded system industries. Simultaneously, processor and SoC simulation is still a very active research area, e.g. what amounts to higher simulation speed, flexibility, and accuracy/speed trade-offs. This book presents and discusses the principle technologies and state-of-the-art in high-level hardware architecture simulation, both at the processor and the system-on-chip level.
Covers the significant embedded computing technologies highlighting their applications in wireless communication and computing power An embedded system is a computer system designed for specific control functions within a larger system often with real-time computing constraints. It is embedded as part of a complete device often including hardware and mechanical parts. Presented in three parts, Embedded Systems: Hardware, Design, and Implementation provides readers with an immersive introduction to this rapidly growing segment of the computer industry. Acknowledging the fact that embedded systems control many of today's most common devices such as smart phones, PC tablets, as well as hardware embedded in cars, TVs, and even refrigerators and heating systems, the book starts with a basic introduction to embedded computing systems. It hones in on system-on-a-chip (SoC), multiprocessor system-on-chip (MPSoC), and network-on-chip (NoC). It then covers on-chip integration of software and custom hardware accelerators, as well as fabric flexibility, custom architectures, and the multiple I/O standards that facilitate PCB integration. Next, it focuses on the technologies associated with embedded computing systems, going over the basics of field-programmable gate array (FPGA), digital signal processing (DSP) and application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) technology, architectural support for on-chip integration of custom accelerators with processors, and O/S support for these systems. Finally, it offers full details on architecture, testability, and computer-aided design (CAD) support for embedded systems, soft processors, heterogeneous resources, and on-chip storage before concluding with coverage of software support in particular, O/S Linux. Embedded Systems: Hardware, Design, and Implementation is an ideal book for design engineers looking to optimize and reduce the size and cost of embedded system products and increase their reliability and performance.
High-Performance Computing using FPGA covers the area of high performance reconfigurable computing (HPRC). This book provides an overview of architectures, tools and applications for High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing (HPRC). FPGAs offer very high I/O bandwidth and fine-grained, custom and flexible parallelism and with the ever-increasing computational needs coupled with the frequency/power wall, the increasing maturity and capabilities of FPGAs, and the advent of multicore processors which has caused the acceptance of parallel computational models. The Part on architectures will introduce different FPGA-based HPC platforms: attached co-processor HPRC architectures such as the CHREC’s Novo-G and EPCC’s Maxwell systems; tightly coupled HRPC architectures, e.g. the Convey hybrid-core computer; reconfigurably networked HPRC architectures, e.g. the QPACE system, and standalone HPRC architectures such as EPFL’s CONFETTI system. The Part on Tools will focus on high-level programming approaches for HPRC, with chapters on C-to-Gate tools (such as Impulse-C, AutoESL, Handel-C, MORA-C++); Graphical tools (MATLAB-Simulink, NI LabVIEW); Domain-specific languages, languages for heterogeneous computing(for example OpenCL, Microsoft’s Kiwi and Alchemy projects). The part on Applications will present case from several application domains where HPRC has been used successfully, such as Bioinformatics and Computational Biology; Financial Computing; Stencil computations; Information retrieval; Lattice QCD; Astrophysics simulations; Weather and climate modeling.
