FPGA Development

This course is designed to teach people wanting to get into FPGA development the basic skill set needed to become effective designers.

Due to the length and depth of the course the delivery is split over a number of days.

Course Components

FPGA Requirements and processes flow

• What is engineering governance
• Review Processes / Check Lists / Gate Reviews
• Example Review Stages e.g. SRR / PDR, CDR, etc
• Standards we might work with
• Do254 / iec61508 / iso26262
• Safety integrity Level
• Failure Space
• System engineering V Model
• Challenges of environments – Temperature, Vibration, Radiation, EMC

Systems Engineering

• What makes a clear requirement
• Levels of Requirement
• Cross Referencing
• Engineering Budgets
• Verification Strategies

Architecting the FPGA – how to approach the architecture of the device

• Key elements of FPGA Architecture
• IO planning
• Clocking

Architectures and considerations

• Global, Regional, Source Synchronous Clocks
• IP Blocks, Reuse, standardisation
• Interconnect technology AXI, APB, Wishbone
• External interfaces I2C, SPI, UART
• Bridging external to internal interfaces and technology
• Complex memories e.g DDR3, DDR4
• How to define architectures & registers - Using SysML
• Clock Domain Planning and safe CDC analysis
• Documenting the architecture
• IO – Standards, Drives, Pulls
• Clocks
• Memory Map

Documentation for modules required to be developed

• IO
• Clocking
• Registers
• Error conditions and failure cases

Verification strategies

• Planning for verification
• Verification Documentation
• Commonly used frameworks
• UVM
• UVVM / OSVM
• Cocotb
• Corner cases and boundary conditions
• Constrained random
• Code Coverage
• Self-Checking Test Benches
• Independence in verification

Constraints

• What is the purpose of constraints – Physical and timing
• Where do we use constraints
• Synthesis – Control Optimisation etc
• Placement – Control physical placement and location
• Advanced e.g. Partial Reconfiguration / Isolation Flow

FPGA initial design skills

• How to design FPGA using VHDL
• Leverage Packages / Libraries / procedures and functions
• FSM Styles – Single Process, Safe State Machines,
• Counters – Coding for performance, safety
• Pipelining,
• Working with BRAM and DSP

FPGA advanced skills

• Clock domain crossing,
• Coding for security / reliability
• FSM
• SECDED on Memories,
• Isolation flow, TMR,
• FPGA Mathematics
• IO structures – I/OSERDES, DDR etc

IP Usage

• When and where is it appropriate to IP
• How to integrate IP in your design to enable portability

Softcore processors

• Creation of MicroBlaze solution in FPGA
• Debugging MicroBlaze
• Integrating with IP
• Real Time, Interrupt Driven Processing
• Boot and Configuration Options

System on Chip Design

• Creation of Zynq / MPSoC based systems = Basic intro to SoC system creation
• FPGA /SW integrations and communication
• Embedded Linux
• Debugging – Cross Probing

Timing Analysis

• What is STA
• How to find failing paths
• Correction of issues
• Routing vs Logic
• How to analyse IO timing

Debugging on Hardware

• Considerations for board bring up
• Debug methodology and how to debug a design
• Use of ILA