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| title | author | date | description | tags |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Computer From Scratch | Collin J. Doering | Jun 19, 2015 | Building a computer from scratch using VHDL | general, programming, hardware, nand-to-tetris |
Recently I have had the pleasure of completing the course Nand to Tetris on Coursea. Firstly, I'd like to highly recommend it to anyone! I never thought it would be possible for me to understand computers all the way down to the hardware level (past assembly that is); Nand to Tetris has shown me otherwise! It has also inspired me to pursue learning a real world hardware description language and attempt to implement the Hack system on an FPGA. In this article I will describe how the process is coming and the what remains to be completed.
After implementing the Hack Computer System in the hardware description language described by the course, I went on to implement everything in VHDL, with the end goal of being able to realize the design on a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). I also needed a set of test benches to verify correctness of the design through simulation. Initially I set out to find a completely open source solution. To my dismay, I found that FPGA's are incredibly proprietary. Namely, the process of synthesis cannot be done using open source tools, though there exists a few projects which are reverse engineering the bit file format of various FPGA's in order to develop a open solution to synthesis, they are not yet ready for use. So, synthesis needs to be done with proprietary tools.
which is taking the hardware description (either VHDL or Verilog) and convert it to a bit file (a format the FPGA can use).