The Mojo also has an Arduino-compatible microcontroller whose main function is to program the FPGA over USB. With a working environment, we will work through a basic project that will turn on an LED when a button is pressed. You can do with this with VirtualBox and Ubuntu, both of which are free. Unfortunately, Macs are not supported by Xilinx’s tools, but you can work through a virtual machine running a compatible operating system. We will also walk you through all the steps to set up the necessary software on Windows or Linux. In this chapter, we will explain a little more about what FPGAs are and what they are good at. You can reconfigure the FPGA as many times as you want, and each time it will become the new circuit without needing to physically change anything! A more detailed description of how this all works is covered later.

This works by configuring small blocks (known as slices) to perform logic functions and connecting them together to implement your larger design. These devices allow you to design a digital circuit, and the device will become that circuit. An FPGA belongs to a family of devices known as programmable logic devices.

Unless you already know what all that means, it is still not very helpful, so let’s break it down a little more. That mouthful is simply trying to tell you that you can program an FPGA over and over (field programmable) and that it is more or less just a large array of logic gates (gate array). This means they can be joined up in a point-and-click way.FPGA stands for field programmable gate array. They are all built around a common bus (which admittedly differs between X and A, but at least within their own tool its common). That's one of the benefits of the IP offerings that are integrated with Xilinx and Altera's SOC development products. Once you get to having multiple cores, making them all interact can be interesting as well. It says nothing about commercial terms as far as I recall. SignOnce is a license which means you only have to get your lawyers to check it out once and then you can proceed with various vendors knowing that the legalese is the same with all of them. Figure on 10x in price if you want the source. There are some who will also license per-project, or take part of the payment as royalty.Īnd then you need to consider whether you just want a 'netlist' or the actual source for the core. In terms of commercial licensing, my experience is that many companies are still to be operating under an ASIC frame of mind, where they charge a huge amount up front. BTW, how the GPL (which is how some of them are licensed) affects the disclosure of the rest of your FPGA code is still under debate :) On the other hand, some of them do work out of the box. The opencores cores are of very variable quality, so you might find a lot of work involved in getting it going. As others have said there are many models for licensing.

Fpga how it works