Scientia Publishing House – Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania

Újrakonfigurálható digitális áramkörök tervezési és tesztelési módszerei [Reconfigurable Digital Circuits Design and Test Methods]

Nowadays, it is very important to implant an idea into practice as soon as possible. In digital circuit design, the FPGA circuits and the use of the suitable design methods play a particularly important role. The hardware design languages (VHDL, Verilog) have an important role in circuit design. Current design tools, besides HDL-based design, have now been able to specify the functionality of a circuit in different high-level programming languages (C, C ++, System C, Matlab). The book summarizes the design and testing methods used in FPGA-based circuit design.

The first chapter provides insights into design methods, detailing the basic steps of digital circuit design and testing. The first chapter presents the design methods of digital systems, the description of the digital circuits in different domains such as behavioural, structural or physical. It describes the steps to be followed to give a physically functional digital circuit, starting from formulating the requirements. It also gives an introduction to VHDL description-based digital hardware design. It highlights the basic standards associated with VHDL. It presents the grammatical elements, the specifics of VHDL, the structure of the VHDL language, the use of libraries, and the connection between the planned hardware and the VHDL.

Chapter Two details the sequential VHDL instructions. In the next chapter, concurrent VHDL instructions are introduced. Multiple circuits’ functionality can be described also by sequential and concurrent VHDL expressions. Sequential- and concurrent-expressions-based implementation for basic digital circuits are discussed by comparative examples. The following section presents various possible testing solutions of the designed digital circuit. In the first part of the chapter, a simulation-based testing of the circuit is presented with an example of how to create the test bench. In the second half of the section, the-run time testing of an FPGA-implemented circuit is presented with the integration of ILA logic analyser into FPGA circuit. Chapter five details the design steps for a finite-state machine with data path (FSMD) and its VHDL-based implementation. In chapter six, an FSMD-based implementation in VHDL in Vivado environment of a specific task is presented. The last two chapters discuss the high-level synthesis (HLS) based design solution of the circuit.

In Chapter seven, the use of System Generator tool for digital circuit design and testing is detailed. From the point of view of rapid prototyping of an application the hardware co-simulation is a useful design and test solution. The chapter presents the hardware co-simulation based implementation and test for pulse width modulation signal generator. In the last chapter, the basics of circuit design based on High Level Synthesis are detailed: the description of the constraint in design, the description of the operation of the circuit, the interfaces and the port signals in C high level programming language. A series of simple examples introduces the reader to HLS based circuit design details. Based on the knowledge presented in the book the reader will have an insight into the choice of appropriate design tools and design methods as well as the efficient design testing solutions.