Winners Announced: We're Giving Away Up to 10 Arty-S7 Boards to Use in an Upcoming Xilinx Workshop!

Most of my FPGA experience has been with writing Verilog code (ie: Vector Display GPU Project, Xmas Audiovisual Show). This workshops look like a great opportunity to learn how to do stuff with higher level tools and also learn how to use Microblaze to use DDR memory, interface to an SPI IC and interface with Verilog.

I had a brief introduction to FPGAs during my college days. Now after a long time I have again got an opportunity to work with FPGA, specifically, hardware acceleration of neural networks with FPGAs.

While most modern FPGA and associated tutorial are geared towards just getting the trained model into the hardware, they abstract the inner working and the "art of FPGA design" a lot.

I wish to learn just this. I wish to start just with a design idea and implement it from scratch on the FPGA fabric.

For this, I feel getting my hands on an Arty would be really nice.

There are several small bits that must be done in correctly in order to actually get the design to run such as configuring the clocks, the constraint files etc.

I wish to follow along the upcoming tutorials and try it out on the board (if I get one).

The best part, as mentioned in the agenda would be to really implement something as small as an arduino or even an 8051 controller on the FPGA and see it work.

Best Regards

Sambit

This is another really great initiative by element14 and would help further promote programmable logic in the community. The Artys, the Zynqs, the Pynqs and the Basys are giving to the electronics community what Gutenberg gave to education through the printing press. They bring this exciting field to the masses.

I am a great fan of Adam Taylor`s demonstrations of exciting FPGA applications, especially on Xilinx FPGAs. I have attended many webinars on using Vivado, the Vitis platform, the legendary Microzed chronicles series(....correct me if I have missed something). I am fairly new to this domain and am really motivated to actually implement a real-life project on programmable logic. I have experience using Spartan 6 FPGA for a robotics project that primarily involved FOC of BLDC motors.

However, I have never used Spartan 7 FPGAs. I have only heard of the many advantages they offer and of course, the option to use Vivado in the design loop which makes life a lot easier. My motivation for attending the workshop is to get familiar with the Arty-S7, the design process and the nitty-gritty details these webinars portray. The reason for getting familiar with the Arty S7 is that I am participating in a Processor Design Challenge organised by the Department of Science and Technology, Govt of India, which stipulates to implement the processor core on the Arty-S7 only. This has been done to maintain a standard, according to the organisers.

Implementing a Microblaze processor would be particularly interesting since it would help me prepare for the competition since the problem statement is so similar. Also, interfacing options through peripherals would be interesting to work with since it opens up a world of possibilities using various sensors and add-ons.

The workshop would do me a world of good as it would simplify the learning process involved in any new device, however familiar you are with the technology. If I could get my hands on one Arty-S7, I would be able to prepare for the Contest in a better way, since actually seeing things happen in practice is much more helpful than probing the testbench for faults. I have always wanted to use the IP blocks available on Vivado and Vitis for doing some cool image processing projects I see my role model - Adam Taylor, demonstrating in various webinars. Having an Arty-S7 would help me realise those in practice.

Eagerly waiting for the workshop!!

Regards

Moinak

Great to see follow up webinars on Xilinx FPGAs back to back here at E14!

I am specifically interested in this workshop to understand and learn about building custom microcontrollers, use microblaze and build an interface for sensors.  I have been following this book 'Designing with Xilinx FPGAs' by Sanjay Churiwala and worked on basic projects and simulations with ZYNQ. Hopefully, this webinar will help me to gear up more and extend knowledge by the hands-on experience with Spartan-7, and it would be nice to have one to follow fluently throughout this workshop.

Eagerly looking forward for the series!

Thanks.

There was a really good webinar on running an ARM M1 or M3 core on the Arty S7 back in April. It was really good, but I think it will be better once it's supported in Vitis rather that needing Keil uVision and an external debugger. This was supposed to be happening with Vitis 2020.1 but I've not heard anything since that has been available.

It will be really nice to have xilinx fpga so I can get started with DesignStart FPGA from ARM and follow free ebook

'System-on-Chip Design with Arm Cortex-M Processor'. These webinars will really help in getting familiar with xilinx

tools.

It's not so much a hobbyist thing - most are happy with ready made boards.

I have had many clients who could not stand the add on cost of using BGA packages in the early stages of a project.

And also quite a few where a fine pitch BGA would be a problem in production. Their eventual build totals have ranged

from a few (ie project never got beyond prototype) to a few hundred thousand.

Microchip built their entire micro processor business on the basis that you can't call the value of a design-in of your parts

until years later - so they made it really easy to design in PICs, pioneered low cost dev boards and made Motorola (8 bit

micro world leader at the time), history. Microchip will still sell you parts in DIP packages !

Microchip are bigger than XIlinx (2019 revenue $5.35E9 v $3.06E9)  - there's gold in those jelly bean parts !

MK

I've also thought that an easy solderable FPGA would be great. Not every project needs a really high pin count either. However whilst I agree with you, I wonder how significant the hobbyist / low volume market is to Xilinx.

It's nice that Xilinx are promoting the Spartan7 and design tools, and nice that E14/Farnell are involved - but they are missing a very important trick.

The Spartan 7 processors are reasonably cheap in 1 offs from Farnell but only available in very fine pitch BGA packages - this makes to cost of prototyping

and using these parts in modest numbers prohibitively expensive. With the UltraSacale FPGAs it doesn't matter too much - the kind of thing they do is

going to be expensive to develop anyway.

The S7s are perfectly feasible for logic replacement and fairly simple applications in every respect except for packaging.

Competitors offer this kind of part in TQFP and increasingly in QFN -  an S7 in 88pin QFN or 100pin TQFP would be great, and an S7 with an embedded SDRAM

in either of those packages would a really irresistible part.

So if anyone from Xilinx is reading this ...............

MK

This is a great board to get started with FPGAs. In fact, my own journey into programmable logic began almost 2 years ago when kk99 sent me an Arty-S7 board!

If you feel brave enough to jump into something very different from microcontrollers then I can really recommend it. I'm sure this course will give you a good foundation too.