ZYBO Smart Car

The ZYBO Smart Car was developed by Digilent China. It is one of the items in the Zrobot line, the educational kit solely developed by Digilent China. The smart car is powered by the Digilent ZYBO that features Xilinx Zynq technology. Users can control the robot from an Android phone using the Bluetooth interface within 20m. The OS is Linux. Users can develop the software and Linux driver using Xilinx Vivado.

History of the FPGA

As you probably know, one of Digilent’s major focuses is producing FPGA (field programmable gate array) boards and educating the public on FPGA design. One of the classes I was in last semester focused on FGPA design. This class is EE324 at WSU, which is taught by Digilent’s own Clint Cole. He gave a background lecture on the History of FPGA chips. Not only was it an extremely interesting lecture, but it also helped me understand the huge leaps in logic design that have been made since the 1960s. This is the history that led to the development of FPGA chips. The chips are the parts that Xilinx makes that we use on our FPGA boards.

New Product– the Nexys 4 DDR

Our new product, the Nexys4 DDR, is now available for sale! We have been anxiously awaiting this board’s release ever since we received an end-of-life notice from Micron (our memory provider) about cellular RAM that we had been using on all of our Nexys-class products. Rather than strip features off the current Nexys4, we decided to evolve the product line to accept DDR Memory. Check it out now!

What Are Muxes and Demuxes?

A huge part of FPGA design is using logic blocks in design. With logic blocks, you can compartmentalize your design, rather than trying implement everything in one shot. Designing without smaller blocks would be like trying to design a car without subsystems like the braking system or engine. About half of the way through the course there is a project that covers a variety of basic logic blocks, including multiplexers (muxes) and demultiplexers (demuxes). So what are muxes and demuxes?

Computer Memory: Differences between the types of…(what was it again)… memory!

Computers have several difference ways of keeping track of the information that it is given. Most people in the world, which included myself until recently, might think there are only two kinds of memory: the “random access memory” (RAM) that computers have, and the flash memory that you can put on a thumb drive and carry around in your backpack without an issue. However, despite knowing that these two types of memory are not the whole picture, it was my personal experience that trying to learn more usually resulted in my eyes instantly glazing over; this is rather unhelpful in terms of actually learning something. Keeping this in mind, we’re going to do a broad overview of the different types of RAM, hopefully without the glazing over effect.

FPGA Design Flow Using Vivado Workshop!

Digilent is proud to announce that together with our Brazilian distribution partner, Anacom, and our academic partner Xilinx University Program, we will be hosting a workshop, “FPGA Design Flow using Vivado,” from Oct 29-30. This course will provide professors with an introduction to digital design tool flow in Xilinx All Programmable devices using Xilinx Vivado Design Suite. It will be held at Escola Politécnica da UFBA, Brazil. Attendees will use the Digilent Nexys 4 and the Xilinx Vivado Design Suite to gain the hands-on experience with digital design, basic HDL knowledge, Xilinx 7-series architecture overview, and Xilinx Vivado design suite.