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Dont be fooled by the appearance of VHDL/Verilog. you are building hardware with them. So writing a TCP/IP stack in VHDL would be almost like physically buildin

Dont be fooled by the appearance of VHDL/Verilog. you are building hardware with them. So writing a TCP/IP stack in VHDL would be almost like physically building a TCP/IP stack with physical logic gate IC's. I looked into this a few years ago. If you can settle for just sending bytes on an ethernet cable, you can relatively easily TX/RX using UDP Multicast. The FPGA can beam bits straight to the PHY adapter and out they go.

Koshkin 10y ago
> you are building hardware with them Actually, not quite, not with FPGA. Sure, you can use an HDL to synthesize a custom microchip, in which case you indeed would be "building hardware", but you can also target an FPGA specifically, in which case you would essentially be programming a kind of a computer in a way similar to how it was done on those (early) switchboard-based computers that were configured by manually making wired connections between a fixed set of logical and arithmetical devices. You could say that one would be "building hardware" in such case as well, but since the system could be easily reconfigured at any time so that it could perform a different function, to me it looks more like programming... (I guess, the right way to look at this is as something where the distinction between hardware and software gets blurred to the point that any serious argument about the meaning of words becomes, well, meaningless.)
- dom0 10y ago
  "encoding of control flow" (program, automaton, turing machines) vs. "encoding of data flow" (PAL configurations, CPLD, FPGA bitstreams, analog computer configuration)
- RandomOpinion 10y ago
  The early computers (for the most part) were von Neumann architecture machines just like modern computers, with an instruction pointer, registers, branching, and so forth that most people associate with conventional software development. FPGAs are a undifferentiated sea of configurable logic gates with configurable connections between them[0]; it's not quite wiring together bare transistors but it's not that far removed either. None of the elements of a von Neumann architecture are there; if a engineer wants any of those things in their design, they would have to assemble it themselves from the available gates[1]. So, no, building a design for a FPGA has little to do with programming in the sense that most people mean it. [0] With various special function blocks interspersed at regular intervals depending on the manufacturer and model of the FPGA [1] or buy a pre-made soft-IP core
  - Koshkin 10y ago
    > little to do with programming in the sense that most people mean it No disagreement here, but see, e.g., http://fpgacenter.com/fpga/fpga_prg.php http://fpgacenter.com/fpga/fpga_prg.php.

Koshkin 10y ago

> you are building hardware with them Actually, not quite, not with FPGA. Sure, you can use an HDL to synthesize a custom microchip, in which case you indeed would be "building hardware", but you can also target an FPGA specifically, in which case you would essentially be programming a kind of a computer in a way similar to how it was done on those (early) switchboard-based computers that were configured by manually making wired connections between a fixed set of logical and arithmetical devices. You could say that one would be "building hardware" in such case as well, but since the system could be easily reconfigured at any time so that it could perform a different function, to me it looks more like programming... (I guess, the right way to look at this is as something where the distinction between hardware and software gets blurred to the point that any serious argument about the meaning of words becomes, well, meaningless.)

dom0 10y ago
"encoding of control flow" (program, automaton, turing machines) vs. "encoding of data flow" (PAL configurations, CPLD, FPGA bitstreams, analog computer configuration)
RandomOpinion 10y ago
The early computers (for the most part) were von Neumann architecture machines just like modern computers, with an instruction pointer, registers, branching, and so forth that most people associate with conventional software development. FPGAs are a undifferentiated sea of configurable logic gates with configurable connections between them[0]; it's not quite wiring together bare transistors but it's not that far removed either. None of the elements of a von Neumann architecture are there; if a engineer wants any of those things in their design, they would have to assemble it themselves from the available gates[1]. So, no, building a design for a FPGA has little to do with programming in the sense that most people mean it. [0] With various special function blocks interspersed at regular intervals depending on the manufacturer and model of the FPGA [1] or buy a pre-made soft-IP core
- Koshkin 10y ago
  > little to do with programming in the sense that most people mean it No disagreement here, but see, e.g., http://fpgacenter.com/fpga/fpga_prg.php http://fpgacenter.com/fpga/fpga_prg.php.