Designers Corner with Prof. Mike Smith  Part 1

Where to start design

We wanted to connect an FPGA to the Internet. Many people said this had already been done, but they didn’t understand that we didn’t want to use a PC, we wanted to plug the Ethernet cable into the FPGA. Explaining this concept was a recurring problem throughout the project and most people didn’t get it.

My standard approach to starting a new design is to gather information. In Silicon Valley I usually head for the Terman engineering library or the Bookstore at Stanford. What we needed was too new and too valuable to be easy to find, so I turned to the Web and the other great source of information in Silicon Valley: Fry’s the electronic supermarket. The closest Fry’s gadget to what we wanted was a print server; a small box that allows you to connect to a printer via Ethernet. I took one apart and found a processor, flash memory, and Ethernet interface chip. This would be one way to go: embed a processor core in the FPGA with software. That at least would be where we would start. Often it doesn’t matter exactly where you start, as long as you start somewhere.

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