Want To Play With FPGAs? Use Your Pico!
Ever want to perform with an FPGA, but don’t have the components? Now, if you have one particular of individuals at any time-considerable Pi Picos, you can start out taking part in with Verilog with out having an FPGA board. The FakePGA undertaking by [tvlad1234], centered on the Verilator toolkit, supplies you with a way to compile Verilog into C++ for the RP2040. FakePGA even integrates RP2040 GPIOs so that they do the job as digital pins for the simulated GPIOs, generating it a important phase up from computer-aided FPGA code simulation
[tvlad1234] provides instructions for location this up with Linux – Windows, even though untested, could theoretically run this by WSL. Utmost clock pace is 5KHz – not a lot, but way better than not owning any components to test with. All the things you’d want is in the GitHub repo – setup directions, Verilog code necessities, and a couple of configuration caveats to preserve in thoughts.
We cover a lot of assignments in which FPGAs are employed to emulate components of a variety of kinds, from ISA playing cards to an overall Activity Boy. CPU emulation on FPGAs is basically the norm — it’s just something easy to do with the sort of electric power that an FPGA delivers. Owning emulation in the opposite way is uncommon, though, we have found FPGAs getting emulated with FPGAs, so possibly it was inescapable soon after all. Of system, if you have neither a Pico nor an FPGA, there’s generally browser based emulators.
We thank [Randy Glenn] for sharing this with us!
