Follow Up to the 7 Ways to Leave Your Spartan-6 Program: How Well Do You Like Working with the Spartan-7 FPGA?

I am a person without any experience in hardware design. I work as a JAVA software developer for banking applications with some foray into embedded software development for payment terminals and vending machines.

It has been my first in-depth experience with an FPGA, so I cannot compare it with other FPGAs or with other development environments such as Intel Quartus which, although I know of, I have only used it to run examples without any modification.

Earlier this year I participated in the 2021 Adaptive Computing Challenge Developer Contest on Hasckster.io in the category of Edge Computing with Xilinx Kria KV260 Vision Starter Kit. It was a different experience because that kit did not require any FPGA knowledge. Xilinx provides a complete environment for someone with only knowledge of embedded software to build applications that can take advantage of hardware accelerators for machine learning and computer vision with a wide variety of pre-trained models.

The 7 Ways to Leave Your Spartan-6 Program has been a totally different experience. I started from the total ignorance of what an FPGA was and I have ended up understanding well what an FPGA is, what the Spartan-7 contributes and daring with a new Spartan challenge in the new Sensor Fusion Challenge with the SP701 development board.

What has cost me the most? Understand what the development tools are and what is the function of each one. For a person outside the world of Xilinx, my first problem was to understand what it means, Vivado, Vitis, Vitis HLS, ISE, SDK, Simulink Matlab, Petalinux, ... It is a real nonsense for someone who is starting out. The Xilinx development tools have changed their names and functions over time and it is very difficult to make a mental map of what each one does, what FPGAs they support and what development environment (operating system, processor, RAM memory, disk memory) require. A simple document presenting the different development suites for Xilinx FPGAs over time with the requirements for each would make it easier for those wanting to get started on their own to get started.

The Spartan-7 has been fascinating to me, perhaps more because of the ease of working with Vivado and Vitis and Vitis HLS. I barely remember any problem. In just a few months I have been able to make my own PL designs in SystemVerilog, Custom IP Peripherals, baremetal applications with Microblaze and High Level Synthesis with Vitis HLS or simply build systems with Vivado IP Integrators and the block designer.

The documentation is very complex and extensive. There is so much that it is sometimes difficult to try to do a quick read without getting lost in another document along the way. The hardest part for me has been getting into the concept of "Vitis unified software platform" to understand which libraries can be used directly with the Spartan-7.

I still have a lot to explore about the Spartan-7 and I'm taking advantage of the Sensor Fusion challenge to improve my knowledge.

Summing up the program has been a unique experience for me, I have learned a lot in a very short time. I would repeat the participation in a similar program. Having 24 other program partners has also been very satisfying. And I would also like to thank many element14 members from outside the program for their participation in the forums, who helped me when I had a blockage with the Digilent Arty S-50 board hardware. Finally, thanks to the element14 team who gave me and others an immediate response when we had a problem with the program that did not allow us to go at the pace we wanted.

I am a person without any experience in hardware design. I work as a JAVA software developer for banking applications with some foray into embedded software development for payment terminals and vending machines.

It has been my first in-depth experience with an FPGA, so I cannot compare it with other FPGAs or with other development environments such as Intel Quartus which, although I know of, I have only used it to run examples without any modification.

Earlier this year I participated in the 2021 Adaptive Computing Challenge Developer Contest on Hasckster.io in the category of Edge Computing with Xilinx Kria KV260 Vision Starter Kit. It was a different experience because that kit did not require any FPGA knowledge. Xilinx provides a complete environment for someone with only knowledge of embedded software to build applications that can take advantage of hardware accelerators for machine learning and computer vision with a wide variety of pre-trained models.

The 7 Ways to Leave Your Spartan-6 Program has been a totally different experience. I started from the total ignorance of what an FPGA was and I have ended up understanding well what an FPGA is, what the Spartan-7 contributes and daring with a new Spartan challenge in the new Sensor Fusion Challenge with the SP701 development board.

What has cost me the most? Understand what the development tools are and what is the function of each one. For a person outside the world of Xilinx, my first problem was to understand what it means, Vivado, Vitis, Vitis HLS, ISE, SDK, Simulink Matlab, Petalinux, ... It is a real nonsense for someone who is starting out. The Xilinx development tools have changed their names and functions over time and it is very difficult to make a mental map of what each one does, what FPGAs they support and what development environment (operating system, processor, RAM memory, disk memory) require. A simple document presenting the different development suites for Xilinx FPGAs over time with the requirements for each would make it easier for those wanting to get started on their own to get started.

The Spartan-7 has been fascinating to me, perhaps more because of the ease of working with Vivado and Vitis and Vitis HLS. I barely remember any problem. In just a few months I have been able to make my own PL designs in SystemVerilog, Custom IP Peripherals, baremetal applications with Microblaze and High Level Synthesis with Vitis HLS or simply build systems with Vivado IP Integrators and the block designer.

The documentation is very complex and extensive. There is so much that it is sometimes difficult to try to do a quick read without getting lost in another document along the way. The hardest part for me has been getting into the concept of "Vitis unified software platform" to understand which libraries can be used directly with the Spartan-7.

I still have a lot to explore about the Spartan-7 and I'm taking advantage of the Sensor Fusion challenge to improve my knowledge.

Summing up the program has been a unique experience for me, I have learned a lot in a very short time. I would repeat the participation in a similar program. Having 24 other program partners has also been very satisfying. And I would also like to thank many element14 members from outside the program for their participation in the forums, who helped me when I had a blockage with the Digilent Arty S-50 board hardware. Finally, thanks to the element14 team who gave me and others an immediate response when we had a problem with the program that did not allow us to go at the pace we wanted.