Some highlights from the Verilog Meetup workshop we did at Universidad autónoma de Baja California in Tijuana last week:
- The participating students were familiar with the logic gates and flip-flops but had no prior experience with the hardware description languages. After 1 1/2 days they were able to code combinational and sequential logic to recognize keystrokes and drive LEDs, 7-segment display and moving color pictures on LCD screen.
- On the second day we were joined by Scott Casper @casperscott from Gowin Semiconductor and Victor Torres @victor-torres-14678722a from Harper & Two, a distributor of Gowin. Scott and Victor addressed the students. Victor addressed the students in Spanish because he is from the area, he was studying at Universidad Iberoamericana Tijuana and worked at Samsung Optoelectronics Tijuana (apparently Tijuana is a major manufacturing center for electronic companies).
- We at Verilog Meetup support ~40 FPGA boards with Xilinx, Altera, Gowin and Lattice FPGA, but for such seminars we prefer Gowin because of the speed of synthesis, low cost and use of LCD instead of HDMI or VGA. Gowin is also the only FPGA vendor that offers tools running on Mac with Apple Silicon popular among students.
- At the end we reviewed the code of a simple graphical game and I explained how to move the code from FPGA to ASIC using Tiny Tapeout infrastructure.
- We plan more such events both in the United States and Latin America, as well as in the regions of the Caucasus and Central Asia. In addition to introductory workshops we also promote exercises that prepare the students for internships in electronic companies.
For more details, see our previous posts:
- Verilog Meetup Events In Mexico And Armenia
- A new edition of SystemVerilog-Homework adds exercises that use FPU of an open-source CPU
Some photos from the event:
The list of exercises, with self-explanatory names:
After the event we also walked in the Tijuana historical center: