[Milkymist-devel] FPGA Workshop #3: Computer Architecture, August 29th

[Sébastien Bourdeauducq]

Date: August 29th, 14:00
Venue: /tmp/lab geek collective
Info+Registration: http://www.tmplab.org/wiki/index.php/FPGA_Workshop


Computer architecture is the science and art of selecting and interconnecting 
hardware components to create computers that meet functional, performance and 
cost goals [1].

With the invasion of digital devices during the last decade (cellphones, 
wireless routers, digital TV...), it has become more than ever ubiquitous.

However, it is still a poorly known subject for most people. Even among the 
self-proclaimed hardware hacking community, most fanatics of the Arduino 
development board^W^W open source physical computing platform [2] do not know 
that all the functionality of their much-hyped toy comes from an AVR 
microcontroller chip [3] that has been being manufactured for years by Atmel. 
And among those who know, yet fewer people are knowledgeable about the inner 
working of the AVR microchip; in which computer architecture plays an 
important role.

The reason behind this might be that during decades, computer architecture was 
reserved to academic lectures and companies who had enough cash to build 
integrated circuits costing several hundreds of thousands of dollars. This 
left little room for the individuals, except those who had the guts to wire 
together hundreds of logic ICs together [4]. But these amateur systems lag 
well behind commercial solutions in terms of performance, size, and power 
consumption.

But today's falling costs of powerful FPGAs make it possible for individuals 
to build complete high-performance computer systems (System-on-Chips [5]) from 
scratch.

This workshop will explore this possibility. After introducing basic computer 
architecture concepts and practices, we will load a simplified version of the 
Milkymist System-on-Chip design [6] in the development boards and execute 
basic programs on it. Then, using Verilog HDL, we will design a simple 
peripheral for the system-on-chip, integrate it, and test it on the board.

This workshop is for people who want to discover practical computer 
architecture, and at the same time for those who already know about 
architecture and want to get an introduction about how to add a peripheral to 
the open source Milkymist System-on-Chip.


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_architecture
[2] http://gizmodo.com/5104149/arduino-+-the-open-source-physical-computing-
platform-for-artists-and-engineers
[3] http://www.atmel.com/products/AVR/
[4] http://www.stevechamberlin.com/cpu/category/bmow1/
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System-on-a-chip
[6] http://www.milkymist.org