Learn FPGA Fast With Hackaday’s FPGA Boot Camp

FPGAs have gone from being a niche product for people with big budgets to something that every electronics experimenter ought to have in their toolbox. I am always surprised at how many people I meet who tell me they are interested in using FPGAs but they haven’t started. If you’ve been looking for an easy way to get started with FPGAs, Hackaday’s FPGA boot camp is for you. There’s even a Hackaday.io chat in the group specifically for FPGA talk for questions and general discussion!

While it is true FPGAs aren’t for everything, when you need them you really need them. Using FPGAs you can build logic circuits — not software simulations, but real circuits — and reap major performance benefits compared to a CPU. For digital signal processing, neural networks, or computer vision applications, being able to do everything essentially in parallel is a great benefit. Sometimes you just need the raw speed of a few logic gates compared to a CPU plodding methodically through code. We expect to see a lot more FPGA activity now that Arduino is in the game.

These boot camps gather together some of the material you seen spread over many articles here before, plus new material to flesh it out. It’s designed for you to work through more like a training class than just some text to read. There’s plenty of screenshots and even animations to help you see what you are supposed to be doing. You’ll be able to work with simulations to see how the circuits we talk about work, make changes, and see the results. We’ll focus on Verilog — at least for now — as it is close to C and easier for people who know C to pick up. Still not convinced? Let’s run though the gist of the boot camp series.

What hardware do you need? That depends. Right now we have four boot camps available and you only need real hardware for the final one. The inexpensive Lattice iCeStick demo board is great for your first adventure.

It is cheap (well under $30), has everything you need including a USB programming interface, and there are open source tools. So it makes sense to pick one of these up even if you want to move on to a different FPGA later. Besides, you can always repurpose the board as a logic analyzer once you’ve outgrown it. However, you can go through the first three with no hardware, and you can still follow along on number 4, even if you don’t have the hardware to do the actual work.

If you know nothing about digital logic, you probably want to start with Boot Camp 0. By the time you are done with that, you should understand basic logic gates, combinatorial logic, flip flops, and sequential logic. There’s no real FPGA content there, and if you know the difference between a D and a JK flip flop, what setup and hold times are, and how to create a simple state machine, you can probably skip this one.

Boot Camp 1 and Boot Camp 2 doesn’t directly use FPGA hardware. But they take you through building combinatorial and sequential circuits in Verilog. You can simulate your designs in your web browser or using an offline Verilog simulator.

In Boot Camp 3, you’ll actually move the Verilog into an FPGA configuration. You will need the hardware to get the most out of that. After that, there are some articles here on Hackaday.com about other projects with the same hardware that can take you even further along. The good thing is that until you reach the fourth boot camp, what you learn could apply to nearly any FPGA.

One thing that sets Hackaday and Hackaday.io apart is that we are a very interactive community. So in addition to the comments we are sure to get, we’d also like your help in a few other ways. If you work through these tutorials, keep track of how much time you’ve spent and let us know. We’ll eventually mark the times to help others plan in the future. In addition, let us know what else you’d like to see. Would you like to see new versions of bootcamp 3 for other FPGAs? Would you like more details about state machines, VHDL, or optimizing designs for timing? Leave your comments on the boot camp page, the tutorials page, or the FPGA chat and let us know what FPGA and non-FPGA topics you’d like to see covered in this format.

Scholarships for coding boot camp

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. - Scholarships are available for people to participate in a computer coding boot camp that could lead to a high paying job in software development.

SLO Cal Careers is offering 10 locals the opportunity for a full-ride scholarship valued at $13,495.

Santa Barbara County is offering 15 scholarship opportunities to the same coding boot camp. Applicants must meet program eligibility.

Director of the Workforce Development Board of San Luis Obispo County, Dawn Boulanger appeared live on News Channel 3-12 to talk about the scholarship opportunities and details of the on-line course offered through the University of San Diego.

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Stanford University just schooled Congress on AI

STANFORD, Calif. — When artificial intelligence pioneer and Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li met with President Biden during his recent trip to Silicon Valley, she steered the conversation toward the technology’s massive upsides.

Instead of debating predictions that AI could cause humanity’s doom, Li said, she urged Biden to make a “serious investment” in maintaining America’s research lead and developing “truly benevolent applications of AI.”

On Wednesday morning, Li was on seated on a small stage in a stately dining hall on Stanford’s serene Palo Alto campus, next to Condoleezza Rice, the director of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank. The women were discussing AI’s impact on democracy, the final panel in a three-day boot camp on the technology.

In front of them, a bipartisan audience of more than two dozen D.C. policy analysts, lawyers and chiefs of staff sat in their assigned seats, cutting into their individual fruit tarts.

Hosted by Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI), where Li serves as co-director, the event offered a crash course on AI’s benefits and risks for information-starved staffers staring down the possibility of legislating a fast-moving technology in the middle of a gold rush.

Hundreds of Capitol Hill denizens applied for the camp’s 28 slots, a 40 percent increase from 2022. Attendees included aides for Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), as well as policy analysts and lawyers for House and Senate committees on commerce, foreign affairs, strategic trade with China and more.

Stanford’s boot camp for legislators began in 2014 with a focus on cybersecurity. As the race to build generative AI sped up, the camp pivoted exclusively to AI last year.

The curriculum covered AI’s potential to reshape education and health care, a primer on deepfakes, as well as a crisis simulation where participants had to use AI to respond to a national security threat in Taiwan.

“We’re not here to tell them how they should legislate,” said HAI’s director of policy, Russell Wald. “We’re simply here to just give them the information.” Faculty members disagreed with one another and directly challenged corporations, said Wald, pointing to a session on tech addiction and another on the perils of collecting the data necessary to fuel AI.

But for an academic event, the camp was also inextricably tied to industry. Li has done stints at Google Cloud and as a Twitter board member. Google’s AI ambassador, James Manyika, spoke at a fireside chat. Executives from Meta and Anthropic spoke to the audience Wednesday afternoon for the camp’s final session, discussing the role industry can play in shaping AI policy. HAI’s donors include LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, a Democratic megadonor whose start-up, Inflection AI, released a personalized chatbot in May.

The cost of the boot camp was primarily paid for by the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, said Wald, who said his division of HAI does not take corporate funding.

Reporters were only allowed to attend the closing festivities on the condition that they not name nor quote congressional aides to allow them to speak freely.

The boot camp is one of many behind-the-scenes efforts to educate Congress since ChatGPT launched in November. Chastened by years of inaction on social media, regulators are trying to get up to speed on generative AI. These all-purpose systems, trained on large amounts of internet-scraped data, can be used to spin up computer code, designer proteins, college essays or short films based on user’s commands.

Back in D.C., legislators are crafting guardrails around this technology. The White House is preparing an AI-related executive order and introduced a voluntary pledge instructing AI companies to identify manipulated media, while Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) is commandeering an “all hands on deck” effort to write new rules for AI.

Even among experts, however, there is little consensus around the limitations and social impact of the latest AI models, raising concerns including exploitation of artists, child safety and disinformation campaigns.

Tech companies, billionaire tech philanthropists and other special interest groups have seized on this uncertainty — hoping to shape federal policies and priorities by shifting the way lawmakers understand AI’s true potential.

Civil society groups, who also want to present lawmakers with their perspective, don’t have access to the same resources, said Suresh Venkatasubramanian, a former adviser to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and a professor at Brown University, who engages on these issues alongside the nonprofit Algorithmic Justice League.

“One thing we have learned over the years is that we honestly do not know about the harms — about impacts of technology — until we talk to the people who experience those harms,” Venkatasubramanian said. “This is what civil society tries to do, bring the harms front and center,” as well as the benefits, when appropriate, he said.

During a Q&A with Meta and Anthropic, a legislative director for a House Republican said the group had seen a presentation on how effective AI could be at pushing misinformation and disinformation. In light of that, he asked the panel, what should AI companies do before the 2024 election?

Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark said it would be helpful if AI companies received FBI briefings or other intel on election-rigging efforts so that companies know what terms to look for.

“You’re in this cat-and-mouse game with people trying to subvert your platform,” Clark said.

During the panel on AI and democracy, Li said her hope when co-founding HAI was to work closely with Stanford’s policy centers, such as the Hoover Institution, adding that she and Rice discuss the implications of AI in the hands of authoritarian regimes when they have drinks. “Wine time,” Rice said, clarifying.

By the end of their talk, Stanford’s ability to sway Washington sounded almost as powerful as any tech giant. After Rice commented that “a lot of the world feels like this is being done to them,” Li shared that she visited the State Department a couple months ago and tried to emphasize the boon this technology could be to the health-care and agriculture sectors. It was important to communicate those benefits to the global population, Li said.

clarification

This story has been updated to reflect that the White House is preparing an AI-related executive order and has already introduced voluntary company pledge.