VLSI/FPGA Design P2: Verilog for Design and Verification

Quickly master Digital IC and FPGA Design with this comprehensive course! This chapter (Section 1 of 2) provides a solid foundation for designing digital hardware, suitable for beginners and those looking to enhance their skills.

What you'll learn:

• Digital IP/IC Design Flow: Understand the complete process from concept to implementation.
• Digital Fundamentals: A quick review of essential digital logic concepts.
• Verilator & GTKwave Setup: Learn to install and utilize these powerful tools for Verilog development and waveform analysis.
• Verilog Syntax: Master common Verilog syntax for both design and verification.
• Combinational Logic Design: Design fundamental logic gates, multiplexers (MUX), decoders, and one-hot decoders.
• Sequential Logic Design: Implement synchronous and asynchronous D flip-flops.
• Useful Hardware Blocks: Design practical components like counters, edge detectors, shift registers, sequence checkers, and sync FIFOs.
• Finite State Machines (FSMs): Learn to design and implement FSMs for various applications.
• Testbench Creation: Develop basic testbenches for verifying your designs.
• Synthesis Best Practices: Avoid common synthesis errors like incomplete sensitive lists, latches, multi-driven nets, and combination logic loops.
• Hands-on Practice: Apply your knowledge through practical exercises, including designing and verifying a Z-scan and complex sequence checker (FSM).

Course Overview:

This course covers the fundamentals of Digital IC and FPGA design, featuring over 12 coding exercises and 3 comprehensive projects. We'll explore:

• Theory: From MOS transistors and logic cells to arithmetic data paths, Verilog language, common hardware function blocks, Static Timing Analysis (STA), on-chip buses (APB/AHB-Lite/AXI4), low-power design, Design for Testability (DFT), and System-on-Chip (SOC) concepts (MCU level).
• Function Blocks & Architecture: Dive into FSMs, pipelining, arbiters, clock domain crossing (CDC), FIFOs (sync & async), ping-pong buffers, pipeline architectures (with control, slide window), pipeline hazards, and forward paths, systolic arrays.

Projects:

• SHA-256 algorithm with a simple interface.
• SHA-256 algorithm with APB/AXI interface.
• 2D DMA controller with APB/AXI interface.

Coding Exercises:

Each hardware architecture explanation is followed by a coding exercise with reference code. Difficulty levels range from a few lines to over 200 lines, culminating in a final project exceeding 1000 lines.

Essential Skills:

This course equips you with the essential knowledge and skills needed to succeed in Digital IC and FPGA design. I'll explain what, how, and why behind each concept, encouraging you to develop your skills further.

Explore the full course details and chapter information on my Udemy homepage. If you prefer, a free version of this chapter is available there. For those who want to understand the concepts without the video, enable subtitles for better comprehension.