{"id":379426,"date":"2024-06-22T15:00:14","date_gmt":"2024-06-22T15:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/savepearlharbor.com\/?p=379426"},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-29T21:00:00","slug":"","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/savepearlharbor.com\/?p=379426","title":{"rendered":"A new platform for FPGA seminars based on Gowin Tang Nano 9K: adding sound, graphics and microarchitecture labs<\/span>"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
<\/figure>\n

Gowin has clear advantages over Xilinx in the educational FPGA board market: Gowin boards are several times less expensive, the synthesis speed is several times faster, and the EDA package is two orders of magnitude smaller: we are talking about 1G versus 100G disk space. Of course, Xilinx is still the king of high-end prototyping boards that cost $10K-100K, but for the students such boards are irrelevant; such boards are for ASIC design companies. A beginning EE student needs a board for less than $100, and Gowin not only fits the bill but also covers all the needs, specifically:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \n

    Basic logic design labs: gates, muxes, arbiters, flops, FSMs.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

  2. \n

    Generating graphics, with LCD and DVI\/HDMI output.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

  3. \n

    Sound recognition and sound generation.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

  4. \n

    Processing data from a camera.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

  5. \n

    Microarchitecture labs: data pipelines, FIFOs, memory controllers.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

  6. \n

    Simple CPUs \/ microcontroller-class cores with 3-5 pipeline stages.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

  7. \n

    A mid-range CPU with caches and TLBs that can run Linux (although for this one, you need Tang Mega 138K or at least Tang Primer 25K since Tang Nano 9K is too small for such an application).<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    In this post, we present a platform based on Sipeed Tang Nano 9K that reliably covers the needs for 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6.\u00a0 We are using\u00a0Basic-Graphics-Music example set<\/u><\/a>\u00a0from the corresponding\u00a0github repository<\/u><\/a>).<\/p>\n

    We did not test our setup with a camera and we don\u2019t think it is suitable to synthesize Linux-capable CPU cores, but it is more than enough for the first two years of digital electronic lab and computer architecture curriculum. And it costs less than $40 (compare it with Digilent Nexys A7 with Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA for $350 and Digilent Basys-3 for $165).<\/p>\n

    <\/div>\n

    Gowin also wins a comparison against Altera, although not as clearly as against Xilinx:<\/p>\n