Introduction to FPGA I

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) are, along with Digital Signal Processors, one of the platforms of choice for implementing complex digital signal processing systems. Thanks to Moore's law and the availability of high level modeling environments, more and more algorithms which previously required a software implementation can nowadays be carried out directly in hardware, with the concomitant performance increases. In these lectures, we start with the basics of digital design and go on to describe the design flow that allows us to target our design to an FPGA. A detailed description of the internal architecture of modern FPGA chips is also given, along with recipes to make the best possible use of all the available on-chip resources. Then we go on with hardware implementations of basic arithmetic blocks and more involved operations such as Distributed Arithmetic and CORDIC. Another important topic we treat concerns some potential pitfalls when doing DSP which apply specifically to FPGA implementations.