Behind the Scenes with SUME
You may have heard of the NetFPGA-SUME, Digilent’s amazingly advanced board that features one of the largest and most complex FPGAs ever produced. But what is the story behind it?
You may have heard of the NetFPGA-SUME, Digilent’s amazingly advanced board that features one of the largest and most complex FPGAs ever produced. But what is the story behind it?
With great excitement, we would like to show off the NetFPGA-Sume, our most complicated board to date, featuring the Xilinx, Inc. Virtex-7 FPGA!
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!
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?
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.
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.
I recently found another exciting example of Digilent boards in an academic textbook! The Zynq Book is a handy tool for a deeper understanding of “sophisticated” devices and as the first look at the Zynq System on Chip (SoC). In fact this is Digilent’s mission: to bring engineering to every interested person through affordable materials.
In the world of technology, progress happens so fast that it is almost impossible to find a good and up-to-date source for digital design. That’s why I am so excited that I found Digital Fundamentals, (the 11th edition) by Floyd.
This past month, we have been busily working on the launch of our newest educational board, the Basys3!
At Washington State University, the electrical engineering department uses Digilent FPGAs in several classes. Students are allowed to pick from a variety of our FPGAs. The main choice is between the Nexys or Basys lines of FPGAs. As a student, I hear a lot of confusion from students about the differences between the two series of boards. I figured that students can’t be the only ones who have questions about the difference, so I decided to write a quick summary of the differences. I’ll be using the Nexsys 4 and the soon-to-be newest member of the Basys series as an example. I’ve compiled two lists to highlight the differences between the two.
If you have gone through the Embedded Linux Hands-On Tutorial created by Kaitlyn and now want to learn more about embedded software design using ZYBO and Linux, check out the online embedded software design class …
One of the best parts of traveling to a conference like ASEE is getting to participate in hands on workshops. I love getting to go to these, because many times, these are teaching experiences that I’ve only heard about that use Digilent products, so it was a welcome change to be able to see one in action.
With no class requiring it and no board experience going in, one engineering student designed a five-stage pipelined MIPS processor from scratch in VHDL and ran it on a Digilent …
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