[Dprglist] FPGAs in robots

[Carl Ott]

Hi Kumar,

FWIW -

I considered myself quite good with FPGAs -

Circa 1990 ~ 1997.

I coded relatively large (at the time) Xilinx and Altera FPGAs (e.g. 256
pins per device and thousands of gates) - and was able to run them at
nearly full utilization and max speed over mil-spec temperature ranges -
yet maintain pin assignments regardless of design changes...

I managed to do that with a mix of functional simulation and static timing
analysis tools. At the time, that was using (ASIC focused) Mentor Graphics
tools on SUN workstations (with mostly functional FPGA add-on tools)...

And then I veered away from that path when I moved to Nokia and learned to
"design in
PowerPoint" (teams/organizations/products/marketingAndProductLaunchCampaigns)..

I'm sure certain bits of that FPGA knowledge remain quite relevant - but -
it's probably a safe bet to guess that a few things might have changed a
little since then...

FWIW - after starting briefly via schematic entry, I quickly migrated to
VHDL and highly recommend VHDL or similar language if you're interested. In
retrospect, I imagine that coding hardware in VHDL could leverage quite
similar / analogous design patterns to coding software in an asynchronous /
event driven environment like node.js. That's a hypothesis I'd like to
validate at some point...

I haven't yet hit a DPRG level robot target where I've seriously considered
an FPGA. But I'm very interested to kick ideas around if you're willing...

Best,
Carl



On Wed, Nov 24, 2021 at 4:46 PM Thalanayar Muthukumar via DPRGlist <
dprglist at lists.dprg.org> wrote:

> Has anyone used FPGAs in their robots?
> I got myself an ICEstick to learn FPGAs and wanted to check if anyone in
> the group has experience with FPGAs.
>
> Regards.
> - Kumar
>
> Sent from my iPhone
> _______________________________________________
> DPRGlist mailing list
> DPRGlist at lists.dprg.org
> http://lists.dprg.org/listinfo.cgi/dprglist-dprg.org
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.dprg.org/pipermail/dprglist-dprg.org/attachments/20211124/1505b67a/attachment.html>