VHDL Projects?

Question

What are some great VHDL project examples and ideas?

Answer 1

VHDL Projects

The first thing that you need is a good development board that won't break your bank account. FPGA hardware is decently expensive, which makes the boards pricey. It's not the same with other types of hardware like microcontrollers where you can get many boards for pretty cheap.

With that in mind, a great dev board for people starting out is the Arty A7 by Digilent. For around $130 bucks, you can get a decent FPGA and right out of the box play around with switches, buttons, and LEDs. On top of that, it has DDR3 and Ethernet so that you can move on to more advanced interfaces.

The board can be found here: https://store.digilentinc.com/arty-a7-artix-7-fpga-development-board-for-makers-and-hobbyists/

Then, with the PMOD connectors, it opens up a whole new world of add on functionality. Check out the selection here: https://store.digilentinc.com/pmod-modules-connectors/

For example, you can get LED screens, bluetooth adapters, GPS, accelerometers, digital to analog converters, and analog to digital converters to name a few.

With that in mind, you can come up with all sorts of projects from the different interfaces and capabilities. Here are some ideas to start with the above hardware:

1. Switch detector to LED status
2. Push button debounce circuit
3. Video test pattern generator and DDR3 frame memory driving a VGA display (PMODs: VGA)
4. Ethernet interface
5. Handheld board controller that steers a block on a VGA screen (PMODs: VGA, Accelerometer)
6. Mini oscilloscope for low frequency (PMODs: A/D, VGA)
7. GPS logger (PMODs: GPS, microSD card)
8. Temperature logger (PMODs: Temperature sensor, microSD card)
9. Analog digitizer and analog regenerator (PMODs: A/D, D/A)
10. RS232 serial port interface (PMODs: RS232)

Answer 2

Examples of 10 projects that will bring the potential coder to a new level of VHDL proficiency :

1. Brushless speed controller for hobby type motors.
2. State machine based tic-tac-toe game that can't lose.
3. Text Overlay Controller that can add user text to a video stream.
4. An FIR filter that can work on an HDMI video stream.
5. A TCP offload engine.
6. An Object Tracker based on Histogram color processing.
7. Software Defined Radio.
8. A custom Soft Processor.
9. An IEEE754 compatible Floating Point Unit.
10. A simple Nueral Network for object detection.

Answer 3

A lot of exciting projects can be implemented using FPGAs. FPGAs are programmed through VHDL. Some examples are:

Motor drivers
UART (Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter
Fault Secure Encoder
Digital Alarm Clock
Cryptographic Core Processor
Traffic Light Controller
Car Parking System
Finite Impulse Response Filter
Encryption algorithm implementation
The list goes on and really depends on your interest.