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Comment by sideshowmel | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Good on you, every idiot can count to one.

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

What?

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

Cute snark ayaya :^)

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

Where do all the EEs hang out?

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]”

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/

This book looks great! Thanks for tip. Cheers

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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