Tristan Gingold

You have no hardware knowledge and want to know how people design chips ? You are a software guy, having heard of VHDL or Verilog but never used it ? In this 25 min tutorial, you will learn the basis of hardware design and how to write a simple FPGA design using only FOSS tools. (This tutorial is not about PCB design, but reprogrammable chips design)

This is the same talk as the one of FOSDEM'17. As the room was full, some people were not able to attend so I propose to do it again.

A discussion about the current state of FOSS HDL simulation and synthesis tools, and possible paths moving forward.

You have no hardware knowledge and want to know how people design chips ? You are a software guy, having heard of VHDL or Verilog but never used it ? In this 25 min tutorial, you will learn the basis of hardware design and how to write a simple FPGA design using only FOSS tools. (This tutorial is not about PCB design, but reprogrammable chips design)

The Raspberry PI 3 board is very popular, but mainly known as a Linux platform. But it could also be used to do bare metal development: writing low-level code without any OS. There are almost no tutorials on the internet addressing the main new feature of the RPI-3 board: 4x 64 bit cores (previous generations were 32 bit). Let's fill the gap by this lightening talk: a very short presentation of the board, how to write and build a first example and a demo of a more advanced multi-core application.

An AdaCore intern has rewritten the CrazyFlie drone software, originally in C, into SPARK. In addition to fixing some bugs, this allowed to prove absence of runtime errors. I will present the various technics used to achieve that result, and plan to do a live demo of free fall detection.

The GNAT GPL 2015 release by AdaCore includes a cross-compiler for a new platform: Raspberry Pi 2. We have used this platform to drive and control a real model train in Ada. SPARK was used to prove absence of collisions. I will present the hardware part as well as the software part, and show a video of the model train in action.

'GHDL What's new ?' will present the main changes in GHDL since last presentation at FOSDEM 2015: features added, new frameworks supported, new hosting, and future developments

A panel discussion on topics related to digital design and simulation.

Short presentation of GHDL, followed by a discussion.

GHDL is a libre VHDL simulator. It compiles a design using the gcc or llvm backend. GHDL fully implements VHDL-87, VHDL-93, VHDL-02 and partially VHDL-08.

In 2014, AdaCore has released two new components in the GNAT GPL Edition: GNAT GPL for ARM Bare Board and SPARK 2014. I present the content of GNAT GPL for ARM, its Ravenscar runtime, how to build and deploy an embedded application in Ada and how it was used to teach Ada.

Two different demos will be presented: a Tetris game and a train signalling system. Both are fully written in Ada, with some parts written and proven with SPARK 2014.