Microchip Technology - veryVerilog Mini FPGA kit - Unboxing | DigiKey

We take a look at the veryVerilog mini FPGA kit from Microchip. It provides a hands-on platform for learning MCU and Verilog programming.

Inside the box, you’ll find a PIC16F1455 that’s used as an ICSP programmer, a PIC16F13145 with 32 configurable logic blocks, or CLBs, plus an assortment of resistors, capacitors, LEDs, buttons, jumper pins, a USB-A connector, and a PCB to solder it all together.

In this demo, we’ll show you how to program the board and use the CLBs to control the LEDs.

The user guide provides step-by-step instructions to assemble the kit. This is what it looks like when it’s done. Then all you need to do is plug it in to a USB port.

Microchip provides a simple example on the veryVerilog GitHub repo. Open the programming link, connect to the veryVerilog mini FPGA board, and select the demo hex file to program the board.

We can look at the MCC CLB synthesizer block diagram from this project, also in the repo, to see how this works. The CLBs implement functions in hardware like a mini FPGA, and here we see that the inputs run through a counter and a series of AND, OR, and XOR gates.

So if we press button 0, the three OR gates all output a one and turns all the LEDs on.

If we press button 0 and 2, this sets the XOR gates to zeroes and turns off all the LEDs.

If we just press button 2, we’ve essentially inverted the original pattern.

Button 1 resets and stops the timer, so LED 1 stays on by itself, and button 3 basically creates a 50 percent PWM using the clock.

The CLBs can also implement flip flops, latches, and other hardware, providing flexibility to implement various deterministic functions for use by the MCU.