Tiny Tapeout 4: A PWM Clone Of Covox Speech Thing

Tiny Tapout is an interesting project, leveraging the power of cloud computing and collaborative purchasing to make the mysterious art of IC design more accessible for hardware hackers. [Yeo Kheng …

What’s The Difference Between Tang 9K And 20K (It Isn’t 11…)

[Grug Huhler] has been working with the Tang Nano 9K FPGA board. They are inexpensive, and he noticed there is a 20K version, so he picked one up. Of course, you’d expect the 20K board has a …

The 6809 Lives On In An FPGA

At one point, the Motorola 6809 seemed like a great CPU. At the time it was a modern 8-bit CPU and was capable of hosting position-independent code and re-entrant code. Sure, it was pricey back in …

Manta: An Open On-FPGA Debug Interface

We always can use more tools for FPGA debugging, and the Manta project by [Fischer Moseley] delivers without a shadow of a doubt. Manta lets you add a debug and data transfer channel between your c…

Do We Need A New Hardware Description Language?

When you think about hardware description languages, you probably think of Verilog or VHDL. There are others, of course, but those are the two elephants in the room. Do we need another one? [Veryl-…

QSPICE Picks Up Where LTSpice Left Us

[Mike Engelhardt] is a name that should be very familiar to the hardcore electronics nerd. [Mike] is the developer responsible for LTSpice, which is quite likely the most widely used spice-compatib…

A Cycle-Accurate Sega Genesis With FPGA

The Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is a powerful tool that is becoming more common across all kinds of different projects. They are effectively programmable hardware devices, capable of creat…

Bringing The PIO To The FPGA

We’ve seen some pretty incredible hacks using the Raspberry Pi 2040. However, one of the most exciting bits of hardware onboard is the Programmable I/O (PIO). Not content with it just being a…

Tiny Tapeout 3: Get Your Own Chip Design To A Fab

Custom semiconductor chips are generally big projects made by big companies with big budgets. Thanks to Tiny Tapeout, students, hobbyists, or anyone else can quickly get their designs onto an actua…

An Open Hardware Eurorack Compatible Audio FPGA Front End

[Sebastian Holzapfel] has designed an audio frontend (eurorack-pmod) for FPGA-based audio applications, which is designed to fit into a standard Eurorack enclosure. The project, released under CERN…

Create Your RTL Simulations With KiCAD

[Bob Alexander] is in the process of designing a homebrew discrete TTL CPU, and wanted a way to enter schematics for digital simulations via a Verilog RTL flow. Since KiCAD is pretty good at handli…

Want To Play With FPGAs? Use Your Pico!

Ever want to play with an FPGA, but don’t have the hardware? Now, if you have one of those ever-abundant Pi Picos, you can start playing with Verilog without getting an FPGA board. The FakePG…

Ztachip Accelerates Tensorflow And Image Workloads

[Vuong Nguyen] clearly knows his way around artificial intelligence accelerator hardware, creating ztachip: an open source implementation of an accelerator platform for AI and traditional image pro…

Remoticon 2021 // Rob Weinstein Builds An HP-35 From The Patent Up

Fifty years ago, Hewlett-Packard introduced the first handheld scientific calculator, the HP-35. It was quite the engineering feat, since equivalent machines of the day were bulky desktop affairs, …

Al Williams Tells All In The Logic Simulation Hack Chat

The list of requirements for hosting one of our weekly Hack Chats is pretty short: you’ve got to be knowledgeable, passionate, and above all else, willing to put those two quantities on displ…

Homebrew 16 Bit Computer Reinvents All The Wheels

Building your own computer has many possible paths. One can fabricate their own Z80 or Motorola 6502 computers and then run a period correct OS. Or a person could start from scratch as [James Stane…

Using VHDL To Generate Discrete Logic PCB Designs

VHDL and Verilog are hardware description languages, used to describe and define logic circuits. They’re typically used to design ASICs and to program FPGAs, essentially using software to def…

RISC-V In… Typescript?

We are accustomed to seeing RISC-V implementations in Verilog or VHDL, but [Low Level JavaScript] has one in TypeScript. Before you dismiss it as a mere emulator, know that the project relies on ga…

Slice Your Next FPGA Design

A recent trend has been to convert high-level constructs into FPGA code like Verilog or VHDL. Silice goes the other way: it converts very hardware-specific concepts to Verilog and aims to be a more…

FIR Filters For Xilinx

Digital filters are always an interesting topic, and they are especially attractive with FPGAs. [Pabolo] has been working with them in a series of blog posts. The latest covers an 8th order FIR fil…