Re:Turning .NET assemblies into FPGA hardware
by tverbeure on Sunday December 08, 2019 @11:54AM
(#21736794)
When you program in C, the knobs that you’re setting are the bits of a file or flash memory.
When your program in Verilog, the knobs are the bits of a bunch of LUTs.
Insisting to call it configuration is not only pedantic. It is also not used this way by anybody else. And it’s confusing because it overloads a term that is used universally by all FPGA tools.
It’s hard to see how that makes it any different than just wrong.
Imagine the following conversation in isolation:
“Hey John, what are doing today?” - “I’m configuring my FPGA!”
Ask anyone in the field what is being described above. I guarantee you that nobody would answer that John is writing RTL.
Programming is setting the knobs on the machine, working with an existing structure to get a job done.
Configuring an FPGA is laying out the machine. You are designing the hardware gates and building the structure.
You could argue it’s pedantic, sure. But I think that’s 90% of the reason people struggle with FPGA is they look at it like programming and not hardware design. I was explained this difference by people in the FPGA reverse engineering industry.
So, no to the topic, I still see zero reason to use a .NET programming language to shoehorn how you want mostly non-procedural hardware logic to function. Other than to say you did it and write an article about it.