Learning By Example Using Verilog: Advanced Digital Design With A Nexys 2tm Fpga Board

This book assumes knowledge of digital design using Verilog that you can acquire from the book Learning By Example Using Verilog – Basic Digital Design With a BASYS FPGA board described above. We show you how to design advanced digital circuits using Verilog and implement them on a Xilinx Spartan3E FPGA on the NEXYS2 board that can be purchased from Digilent, Inc. for $99. More than 50 examples are included in the book that display graphics and photos on a VGA screen using sprites stored in block RAM within the FPGA and video data stored in external RAM on the NEXYS2 board. Other examples design a UART to send and receive data through the serial port, design a keyboard and mouse driver using the PS/2 port, store video data in the external RAM and flash memory, and implement the Bresenham algorithm for plotting a line and plotting a circle. Finally, we design a microprocessor core (Forth engine) that executes Forth instructions in a single clock cycle. A free student edition of the Aldec Active-HDL simulator is available from Aldec, Inc. To synthesize your designs to a Spartan3E FPGA you will need to download the free ISE WebPACK from Xilinx, Inc. The Xilinx synthesis tools are called from within the Aldec Active-HDL integrated GUI. We will use the ExPort utility to download your synthesized design to the Spartan3E FPGA on the BASYS board. ExPort is part of the Adept software suite that you can download free from Digilent, Inc. These examples are in Verilog and can be implemented on any prototyping board containing the appropriate peripherals. Over 40 examples in this book will work on the BASYS board.