FPGA design tutorial

This FPGA design tutorial covers various issues in the fields of FPGA design, simulation and synthesis. It is targeted towards both beginners and experienced FPGA designers.

What is an FPGA?

FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) is a chip containing a matrix of logic cells with programmable interconnects, which can be configured by a user. By configuring the function of each logic cell and the way they are connected between each other, one can make FPGA implement any digital circuit (limited only by the capacity of the device).

Configuration bitstreams for FPGAs can be generated from circuit schematics (containing such elements as adders, counters, shift registers etc.). Schematics can be created directly by a user. Another approach (more often used) is to describe a digital circuit in a hardware description language (HDL) and use a special program called synthesizer to convert it into circuit schematic.

Modern FPGAs have also many additional resources besides plain logic cells, like block RAM units, clock management modules, dedicated multipliers etc.

FPGA design is quite simple to start learning, but nevertheless complex to master. This FPGA design tutorial is intended to give a brief introduction to FPGA design, and at the same time to emphasize moments that are often overlooked.

Most (but not all) information in this FPGA design tutorial is targeted to Xilinx FPGAs, but the general principles can also be applied to FPGAs from other vendors.

FPGA design tutorial chapters

1. "Quick start" guide
2. CMOS logic fundamentals
3. The basics of digital circuit design
4. Creating a simple FPGA project with Xilinx ISE
5. Hardware description languages
6. Advanced HDL synthesis for FPGA
7. FPGA design implementation (Xilinx design flow)