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Do you need an FPGA?

In my professional career, I have often been asked the question: what is an FPGA? FPGAs are not as well-known as devices like microcontrollers, which is why they are not widely used. However, this presents a great opportunity for FPGA developers. Although FPGAs are not commonly used in industry o...

Published by P.Trujillo on Apr 13, 2025

SHA256 compute in Verilog

On my last visit to the Embedded World, one of the most popular topics was Cyber Resilience Act and Cybersecurity, and FPGA had much to say in this area. They are fast, they can execute algorithms in parallel, and they are in the lower level of an ethernet interface checking all the packets, … su...

Published by P.Trujillo on Mar 30, 2025

My visit to the Embedded World Conference

Last week I was in Nuremberg assisting at the Embedded World Conference. This is not my first time there, I was there also in 2023 but this year was special, it was my first year as a speaker, talking about real-time simulations on FPGA, but I am going to talk about that later. Before I went, I w...

Published by P.Trujillo on Mar 16, 2025

Creating Pyhon driver for the AXI DMA IP

If someone asks me about the most useful peripheral of embedded systems, I do not doubt that the DMA (Direct Memory Access) is at my top. This is not just for Zynq devices, but from TI DSP, to Microchip devices, being able to move data from a peripheral, or an FPGA, to the DDR memory, without the...

Published by P.Trujillo on Mar 2, 2025

Creating a custom Petalinux image for RedPitaya STEMlab

Some time ago, I wrote an article about how to create a custom hardware design for a RedPitaya STEMlab. Although the article was written in September 2023, things have changed a bit around Vivado and Petalinux. Since in that article I focused on the HW design, in this article I want to put the fo...

Published by P.Trujillo on Feb 16, 2025

The Open Logic project

One of the reasons to writing this blog was to share content and projects about FPGA. When this blog started, in 2020, there were some open-source projects like Yosys or Verilator. Fortunately,the amount of this kind of project, and the number of FPGA engineer that are sharing their knowledge is ...

Published by P.Trujillo on Feb 2, 2025

Adding custom RTL modules to an electrical model

Tools like Matlab and Simulink offer engineers a bunch of packages to do their jobs. As FPGA developers, the packages that, in some cases, could make our designs faster to develop are HDL Coder and HDL Verifier. In addition, if we mix those packages with compatible hardware like the Speedgoat Per...

Published by P.Trujillo on Jan 19, 2025

Application Notes

[AN001] Designing from zero an IIR filter in Verilog using biquad structure and bilinear discretization.

Filtering is likely the most common DSP algorithm that any embedded engineer has to design, no matter it they are developing for an STM32, or TI DSP or, of course, en FPGA. Filtering is such important because the majority of the applications are connected to the real world, so they need to captur...

[AN002] Running subcycle average models on Speedgoat Performance System.

Materials like Silicon Carbide (SiC) or Gallium Nitride (GaN) are making our power electronics converters faster and faster. This means small inductors and capacitors that make, in most cases, the cost of the devices decrease. This also means that the control devices also have to be faster, and n...