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Reusable blocks (Image source: Altium) This whitepaper  by Charles Fulk and RC Cofer is an excellent summary of several techniques, tools and design guidelines for FPGA: FPGA design process Revision control Coding guidelines Scripting automation PCB design for FPGA VHDL capture and simulation (including OS-VVM package) Project Management Design Resources The whitepaper is available here

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Hi, In this series of articles, I am going to present the design of an AXI4-Stream master. As I often do in my tutorials, I will try to show the design procedure for the block, starting from a “bare bones” solution and gradually adding features to it. Xilinx provides a wide range of AXI peripherals/IPs from which to choose. My purpose in making my own block was to learn the protocol ‘hands-on’. As a side effect, this tutorial provides you with a (synthesizable) AXI4 Stream master which I have not seen provided by Xilinx. The closest IP provided by Xilinx, that I know of, is an AXI memory mapped to AXI stream block. Continue reading...

"Xilinx announced today that its Spartan-7 family of FPGAs is now available for order and shipping to standard lead times. As a key member of Xilinx's Cost-Optimized Portfolio, this device family is designed to meet the needs of cost-sensitive markets by delivering low cost and low power entry points that are I/O optimized for connectivity with industry leading performance-per-watt" For more information: Spartan-7 general availability announcement Spartan-7 device page

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Dual Tone Multi-Frequency (DTMF) is a method for encoding and decoding up to sixteen digits and special characters to be sent over a voice channel. DTMF was first developed by Bell Systems in United States, for use in push-button dialing telephones (in constrant to prior phones, which had a mechanic rotary dialing system). DTMF is standardized by ITU-T Recommendation Q.23 A DTMF keypad consists of a matrix of sixteen push buttons organized in four rows by four columns. Each button, when pressed, generates a pair of tones. The tones belong to two groups, a low frequency group (697 to 941 Hz) and a high frequency group (1209 to 1633 Hz). On the picture below you can see the buttons and associated frequencies: Pressing an '8' generates two tones, one low frequency tone of 852 Hz and one high frequency tone of 1336Hz. The frequencies were selected so no one would be an harmonic of another DTMF frequency. As it usually is for many digital transmission systems, the enc...