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Controlling a SMPS from MSS with SmartFusion2 SoC.

FPGAs have been present in the telecommunications field for many years, almost since they were created. On the other side, there are fields where FPGAs have not arrived yet for several reasons such as power consumption or price. But there are other groups where FPGAs have not been present for man...

Published by P.Trujillo on Sep 27, 2021

Implementing a dual core processor in FPGA.

A few years ago, microprocessors manufacturers competed to get the fastest processor. High speed means more tasks can be executed in the same amount of time, but also, means higher power consumption. To improve this, the voltages of the core start decreasing to levels below 1V, and according to t...

Published by P.Trujillo on Sep 13, 2021

Using PCIe in Xilinx 7 Series.

When we look into communicating an FPGA with a computer, the first interface that we can find is UART, but this interface has several limitations in terms of speed. In order to transfer a high amount of data between the CPU and an FPGA, we will need to use some more sophisticated interfaces like ...

Published by P.Trujillo on Aug 30, 2021

Creating Pynq images for custom boards.

In this blog we already talk about Pynq and how it can help us to develop some applications in a easy way. Obviously, Pynq has its limitations but it is still a powerful tool with which we can develop projects in a few minutes. Pynq is Jupyter-notebook based, and includes the corresponding librar...

Published by P.Trujillo on Jul 26, 2021

Equalizing IIR filters for a constant group delay.

In the previous post, I designed an audio equalizer. In that design, I used 3 different FIR filters to split 3 different frequency bands in order to send them to different speakers. Very low frequencies will be sent to the sub-woofer, medium frequencies to the woofer, and high frequencies to the ...

Published by P.Trujillo on Jul 12, 2021

Audio equalizer based on FIR filters.

Digital signal processing can be used in almost all engineering fields, from seismology, to obtain the distance where an earthquake has been generated, to data science, but these areas use digital signal processing as a way to obtain real interest data. On the other hand, in this post, we will ta...

Published by P.Trujillo on Jun 28, 2021

Creating a RISC-V based design on SmartFusion®2 SoC.

Everybody knows that the processor of the moment is the RISC-V, even it is not a processor itself, the amount of the boards based on RISC-V is growing more and more. To understand the reason of that, we have to understand what is RISC-V, and what makes it different to Arm® or x86. First of all, w...

Published by P.Trujillo on Jun 14, 2021

Application notes

[AN001] Designing from zero an IIR filter in Verilog using biquad structure and bilinear discretization.

Filtering is likely the most common DSP algorithm that any embedded engineer has to design, no matter it they are developing for an STM32, or TI DSP or, of course, en FPGA. Filtering is such important because the majority of the applications are connected to the real world, so they need to captur...