VHDLogic

I’ve been fortunate to have made a career out of designing electronic circuits.  Successful electronic design depends upon a lot of factors. Most importantly, the designer must fully understand the technical requirements up front before a circuit can be drafted and ultimately implemented.  Once designed, in the past, we developed very labor intensive prototypes in order to perform verification using bench tools like oscilloscopes, waveform generators and logic analyzers, before committing the design to a printed circuit. Once the “PCB” was assembled, the verification process was then repeated, and often repeated again until the design was proven to meet the technical specs. It’s quite remarkable that we still go through the same fundamental process, albeit in a very different way.

The introduction of the first programmable logic devices in the late 1970′s began a gradual change that became  a quantum leap in the way in which we design, verify and implement digital logic. Thirty-plus years later we have amazing tools at our disposal, often free of charge, to design, simulate, synthesize and verify our circuit designs. However, to be successful one must still fully understand the technical requirements up front.

Over the years, I’ve worked with numerous “development boards” made available initially by the silicon vendors and later by independent companies. More often than not, they served to exploit the latest features built into the silicon device by running a factory “demo program” that consisted of a series of “black boxes” hooked together within the tool suite. While demos were useful, no real understanding of the device was had until the designer wrote some code based on a technical requirement and went through the process of verification in the target device.

My goal with this site is to provide a venue for gathering and disseminating useful open-source building blocks written in the VHDL programming language. And, to support a community of people interested in designing and implementing circuits that meet technical requirements. Feel free to follow our progress and join in as well. I think we can have some fun in the process.