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Julius Baxter edited this page May 22, 2014 · 13 revisions

Welcome to the Chip Hack wiki!

Schedule

Note that timings are approximate and details subject to change!

Saturday 24th May 2014 (10:00-17:00)

Day one will commence with an FPGA primer and introduction to the Verilog HDL. Following which participants will learn by example through a series of increasingly complex hands-on projects, starting with a simple LED-based counter which can be incremented and decremented using push buttons. (See Introduction to Verilog.)

Sunday 25th May 2014 (10:00-16:00)

The morning of day two will be spent implementing a UART transmitter, and for the more ambitious a UART receiver also if time permits.

In the afternoon there will be an introduction to the OpenRISC Reference Platform system-on-chip (ORPSoC), and a practical exercise in which participants will program their boards with an ORPSoC configuration and run bare metal code on the processor! (See OpenRISC SoC on FPGA.)

The event will close with an introduction to the use of Verilog in creating software models of processor designs that are capable of running programs and having a debugger attached to them.

Hardware

The workshop will be based around the Altera DE0-Nano, a highly capable but affordable FPGA development board that features a device with 22,320 logic elements, along with buttons, switches, LEDs, ADC, accelerometer and I/O pins.

It is suggested that participants purchase their own DE0-Nano from a supplier such as RS Components or Farnell. A limited number of boards will be made available by Embecosm for those without their own, however, should the majority not bring hardware some may have to work in small groups.

A laptop computer with a USB port will be required.

Software

If you would like to perform the workshop natively on your machine you will want to download and install the tools below.

Please note that the software should be installed in advance!

Virtual machine

If you are not running a native Linux machine and or would prefer not to install these tools there will be a VM image available on the weekend which will have all of this pre-installed. You will want to have the VM software installed on your machine first, though.