TABLE OF CONTENTS This chapter will present an example project to bring together many of the diverse concepts and recommendations found throughout this book. We will step through the design at a high level, and discuss many of the commonly encountered rapid system development effort trade-offs and design decisions. The flow of this chapter will parallel the FPGA design flow presented in Chapter 3. For convenience, the optimized design flow is presented in Figure 17.1. The primary design phases include requirements, architectural, implementation and verification. Some of the tasks listed in the design flow do not neatly fit into a single stage. Some level of crossover should be expected. We will discuss the important design considerations associated with each of these design stages. Additional resources within this book include an appendix listing FPGA manufacturer application notes and documents, an appendix listing a series of design checklists, and a listing of common design term abbreviations and acronyms.
This section presents an example project concept that is based on an FPGA embedded hard core processor implementation. The intent is to show a potential real-world design example and discuss some of the factors that must be addressed in order to implement the system. The scenario for this example is the development of a rapid system prototype of a product that needs to be demonstrated at an upcoming technology conference. It is critical that the system be fully operational at the conference since the project's next phase of...
