Make: FPGAs: Turning Software into Hardware with Eight Fun and Easy DIY Projects

by David Romano

What if you could use software to design hardware? Not just any hardware--imagine specifying the behavior of a complex parallel computer, sending it to a chip, and having it run on that chip--all without any manufacturing? With Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), you can design such a machine with your mouse and keyboard. When you deploy it to the FPGA, it immediately takes on the behavior that you defined. Want to create something that behaves like a display driver integrated circuit? How about a CPU with an instruction set you dreamed up? Or your very own Bitcoin miner You can do all this with FPGAs. Because you're not writing programs--rather, you're designing a chip whose sole purpose is to do what you tell it--it's faster than anything you can do in code. With FPGAs , you'll learn how to break down problems into something that can be solved on an FPGA, design the logic that will run on your FPGA, and hook up electronic components to create finished projects.

255 pages, Paperback

Published April 12, 2016

About the author

David Romano holds the Thomas G. Strong Chair in Middle East Politics at Missouri State University. Romano's work has appeared in journals such as International Affairs, The Oxford Journal of Refugee Studies, Third World Quarterly and Ethnopolitics. He writes a weekly political column for Rudaw, an Iraqi Kurdish newspaper, and has have spent several years living and/or conducting field research in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Israel and Palestine.