FPGA For All — CERN Releases “colibri” VHDL Library

Since you’re studying Hackaday, we’re fairly certain CERN wants no introduction, so we’ll get proper to it– they’re giving again once more, this time with a VHDL library called “colibri” containing over 100 elements, capabilities, and procedures to assist jumpstart your subsequent FPGA mission.

Like a whole lot of what CERN provides away beneath its CERN Open Hardware Licence, this library and the capabilities in it had been developed in home to make CERN run higher– particularly to streamline the event of gateway gadgets. As you may think, with the prodigious quantity of knowledge CERN’s numerous experiments spit out, FPGAs have change into a key a part of a lot of them. The better part is that as a result of the fantastic people at CERN don’t wish to get locked in, every little thing right here is vendor-independent and has been examined on a number of platforms. Speaking of examined, you get self-checking testbenches in there to ensure every little thing’s working, and there’s even formal verification, at the least for some issues. We’ve seen formal verification in software compilers, however its not frequent within the FPGA planet. The complete factor is on GitLab if you wish to have a look.

While CERN’s library won’t have a lot that can assist you make a ternary processor or bus controller with everybody’s favorite programmable silicon, very like software program libraries it can save you a while at the least not implementing say, SPI or i2c– each of that are in colibri, together with a complete lot extra.

Thanks to [Alberto Perro] for the tip!