Labs 4-5-6 done! Path to the end???

RE: Labs 4-5-6 done! Path to the end???

rscasny — Sun, 02 Dec 2018 16:40:55 GMT

James,

Thanks for a great blog. One of the reasons I picked you for this program was that while you had a good technical background, you weren't as well versed on FPGAs. But your efforts to learn and the great comments your blog here has inspired is a great eye opener to understanding how to master programmable logic devices, etc.

Randall

-element14

RE: Labs 4-5-6 done! Path to the end???

Fred27 — Thu, 08 Nov 2018 14:14:29 GMT

"Block Ram is essentially virtual ram within the FPGA. Since an FPGA can be made into "anything", this is one of the options."

I'm a total beginner at this so could well be wrong, but I don't think this is quite correct. I thought RAM created using the FPGA fabric (i.e. creating lots of D flip flops) is called distributed RAM. Block RAM is dedicated RAM sections inside the PL.

RE: Labs 4-5-6 done! Path to the end???

aspork42 — Thu, 08 Nov 2018 12:16:57 GMT

It might be a good question for someone working at a PCB manufacturer - I was curious about the same thing. I know that where I used to work we had to make text fixtures for each and every PCB we made. I never worked on any that had FPGAs though. I know that I would certainly be using boundary scan if I had ordered a prototype board. This certainly seems like the easiest way validate that the traces are routed correctly.

RE: Labs 4-5-6 done! Path to the end???

Gough Lui — Thu, 08 Nov 2018 08:46:54 GMT

I am again very thankful to Element 15 and Xilinx for putting this training together!

Yep ... that element of surprise [View:/resized-image/__size/16x16/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-3aab10a0-e7c0-405d-93cf-cb5ba1752421/contentimage_5F00_1.png:16:16].

On another note, nice to see what all the course labs are covering content wise. I wonder how much of boundary scan is actually being used in a practical means for testing of PCBs/IC soldering/chip-to-chip connections in reality and how one might actually go about specifying the signals they "expect" to see under a given drive condition.

- Gough