Prerequisites:

• Basic notions of digital electronics (combinatorial and sequential circuits)
• basic C++ programming with usage of templates
• basic python programming
• entry level knowledge of machine learning (not really needed, but it may help for the last part of the course)

Target skills and knowledge: The aim of the course is to provide a hands-on programming laboratory of Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) through the VHDL hardware description language.

Course unit contents:

• Introduction to FPGAs
• FPGA Architecture
• FPGA programming flow
• VHDL language by examples: Introduction to the Vivado programming framework and the Arty A7 board, Combinational circuits on FPGA, Sequential circuits on FPGA, Arithmetic operations on FPGA
• Case study: UART interface
• High Level Synthesis (HLS): Programming flow, Number representations and arithmetic, Understanding and optimizing loops