Having worked with a variety of microcontrollers from AVR to ARM Cortex controllers, I bought a Xilinx FPGA dev board(papilio One) which around $40 to experiment. After getting comfortable with Verilog HDL, I implemented few data encoders-decoders, communication blocks and played around a while. Then my attention turned towards implementing a Soft-core Processor in FPGA. But I need my own instruction set and a Compiler for my soft-processor too. Besides, intensive googling taught me that there are tons of Soft-processor cores. Finally,I settled with ZPU which a 32-bit softcore processor for xilinx FPGA with good amount of peripherals ranging from timers to communication blocks like UART, SPI etc. It has support for VGA screen drivers too. PROJECT: This project was aimed to implement a system to play a small snippet of audio from FPGA's memory using ZPU - soft-core processor. Components used: Papilio One board- Xilinx Spartan XC3S250E A speaker Misc- Resistor
A Maker's Expedition..