[sideshowmel]

I've been looking for something like this for a while. It's hard to break into FPGA design coming from a Software Engineering viewpoint, but I think it teaches how the machine REALLY works and can produce better Software developers.

[danharaj]

I found Digital Design by Mano and Ciletti to be a nice introduction to the basic building blocks of digital circuits. Four weeks later I'm studying laplace transforms and transfer functions please send help.

[rrss]

Good on you, every idiot can count to one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Widlar#Fairchild_Semicondu...

[markrages]

This audience is software developers. They will not have an appreciation for Widlar's genius.

[sumnole]

Where do all the EEs hang out?

[philiplu]

Thanks for the link. I’ve never heard of Wildar before; what an amazing character. Someone had a lot of fun writing that Wikipedia article:

“However, the story about Widlar bringing a goat to trim the lawn in front of his office, retold by The New York Times after his death,[14] was incorrect.[19] It was a sheep, not a goat;[68] Widlar brought her in his Mercedes-Benz convertible for just one day, which included a photo op for the local journalists.[19] According to Pease, Widlar abandoned her in the nearest bar;[19] according to Lojek the sheep was ‘mysteriously stolen’.[68]”

[danharaj]

What?

[rrss]

Famous (in certain circles) quote attributed to Bob Widlar, a legendary analog designer who didn't think much of digital designers.

[danharaj]

Cute snark ayaya :^)

[anyfoo]

Hah. I went down the same path! I started with some "light" signal processing for an FPGA based project, and now, 2 years or so later, I'm deep into Laplace and z-transforms (and the foundations required for that).

You might enjoy those books, available fully online: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/

[bogomipz]

This book looks great! Thanks for tip. Cheers

[bcheung]

I've been going through the book "But How Do It Know" (not a typo) and it's a great introduction on how to build a CPU from scratch starting from basic transistor working up higher and higher levels of abstraction using a bottom up approach. You don't need a lot of math to understand it at all and is a fairly easy read.

[mlevental]

how is that true? which component in a modern processor is akin to an fpga or any ip deployed to an fpga?

[satori99]

I think OP is looking at this the other way around -- meaning that it is perfectly possible to create a soft-core CPU on an FPGA, which is a great way to understand what any processor actually does.

I know this, because I started learning and tinkering with this sort of thing a year or so ago, with no prior experience with electronics or hardware design, or a formal comp-sci education.

I had decades of programming experience already, but I think I have learned more about the fundamentals of computer science while playing with cheap FPGAs, than I have by just writing code.

[alexhutcheson]

All the digital logic building blocks of a processor, from comparators to ALUs up to branch predictors and pipelines, can be defined and wired together in an HDL. If you have a sufficiently large FPGA, then you can "run" that HDL specification on the FPGA to get a working processor.

It's pretty common for computer engineering students to implement a simple RISC processor (often a simplified MIPS) on an FPGA as a class project. In my experience it was a fantastic way to learn the basics of computer architecture.

[anyfoo]

The CPU itself? For example, implementing a toy CPU is much much closer to how an actual, non-FPGA CPU works than, say, an emulator. But really anything done on an FPGA should teach you some portion of gate-level logic (yeah yeah, there's LUTs and other specialized cells instead of gates, close enough).

And staying above physics, that's how computers work.