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When should I start programming with a board instead of Verilog sources on a processor

Former Member
Former Member

So far I have only programmed Verilog sources on the FPGA, similar to BLINKY LED using VHDL on Arty A7 35T FPGA. Yesterday I saw in The Digilent Arty S7: An Unexpected Journey that the hardware offers a lot of help. But how do you decide whether to program with the board or just Verilog?

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    Verilog and VHDL are hardware description languages ​​(HDL), which means they are used to describe how electronic circuits work. Not like programming languages ​​like Python or C that are used to program computers or microcontrollers, HDL focuses on hardware design.

    HDL describes hardware components that can work simultaneously, this is how real circuits work, with many parts working at the same time. In contrast, programming languages ​​typically describe instructions that are executed one after another, although some can handle tasks that are executed at the same time but that depends on the hardware.

    With an FPGA you first describe the hardware, that can be done with HDL or with other tools Matlab with Simulink or Vitis HLS or others.

    That hardware cannot be programmed with C or other programming language unless you add a physical or virtual soft processor  to your hardware. With the Arty S7 and the Arty A7 you can add a soft processor like MicroBlaze that you can program in C with Vitis. That RISC soft processor is synthesized using the FPGA resources.