Dadatis Wiki

Digital Design
First we had sun clocks and water clocks, then mechanical clocks.

These days most of the clocks are digital clocks and they have many advantages. If you want to understand how digital clocks and other digital devices are created, this is a good place to start.

Getting started
VHDL is a language for digital "chip" design.

You can create own "chips" which you can then connect together to create a complex device. Previously you had to make a huge PCB (printed circuit board) even for a simple digital device, now it is possible to fit all those "chips" inside one chip, an FPGA (field programmable grid array).

Install GHDL and GTKWave

Install Geany (lightweight VHDL editor)

Basics 1 - Entity and architecture

Basics 2 - Process template

VHDL for fun
For fun 1 - Clock generation

For fun 2 - Add reset generation

For fun 3 - Simple counter

For fun 4 - Simple counter as component

For fun 5 - PWM Generation

For fun 6 - State machine

For fun 7 - Analog signal from RAM

For fun 8 - Round-robin state machine

More material
Essential VHDL for ASICs (link 1)

Essential VHDL for ASICs (link 2)

FPGA manufacturers
Altera

Xilinx

Lattice Semiconductor

Other topics
Analog to Digital Conversion (ADC)

Digital to Analog Conversion (DAC)

Time and Frequency Domains

Octave