Hardware Implementations Using FPGA and I/O Boards

In the previous chapter, we have been discussing the design applications using FPGA, namely, the PCI Arbiter, Discrete Cosine Transform and Quantization Processor for video compression application. The next step is to design a printed circuit board, which will house the target FPGA and other necessary components that make up the system, populate and test the board using oscilloscope, logic analyzer, etc. When the FPGA board is ready, we need to download the bit stream generated by the place and route tool for the particular application. The frequency of operation reported by the place and route tool is to be taken into account when we actually design the system. The maximum frequency reported by the place and route tool shall not be exceeded on the FPGA board. The hardware development work for the applications we have covered in the previous chapter are quite involved and, therefore, a couple of simpler design applications, namely, a traffic light controller and a real time clock will be presented as examples in this chapter. These applications will be based on ready made boards available such as an FPGA board and a digital input/output board.