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By Mike Szczys
A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is an integrated circuit designed to be configured by a customer or a designer after manufacturing—hence "field-programmable".
Here’s FlorianH's] setup for driving a PlayStation Portable screen with a FPGA. He’s using the DE0-Nano board to do this, and the first order of business was to establish a way to connect the two. He did a great job of etching his own breakout board, which has some traces that are less than 10 mils thick. Soldering the connectors for the screen was a bit of a challenge, and he shared several pictures of the process for your enjoyment.
With everything hooked up he fired it up with just a couple of lines of code to draw a test pattern. From there it was on to building a more intensive driver. FlorianH mentioned to us that he’s just starting to learn about FPGA's after having worked extensively with 8-bit micro-controllers. He’s been documenting his work on his site, and finds himself frequently referencing his own material so remember how he did things. Our vicarious enjoyment is an unintended (but welcomed) consequence of that habit.
A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is an integrated circuit designed to be configured by a customer or a designer after manufacturing—hence "field-programmable".
Here’s FlorianH's] setup for driving a PlayStation Portable screen with a FPGA. He’s using the DE0-Nano board to do this, and the first order of business was to establish a way to connect the two. He did a great job of etching his own breakout board, which has some traces that are less than 10 mils thick. Soldering the connectors for the screen was a bit of a challenge, and he shared several pictures of the process for your enjoyment.
With everything hooked up he fired it up with just a couple of lines of code to draw a test pattern. From there it was on to building a more intensive driver. FlorianH mentioned to us that he’s just starting to learn about FPGA's after having worked extensively with 8-bit micro-controllers. He’s been documenting his work on his site, and finds himself frequently referencing his own material so remember how he did things. Our vicarious enjoyment is an unintended (but welcomed) consequence of that habit.