ECAD and Architecture Practical Classes
FPGA Development Guide
A typical work-flow for FPGA design may be separated into three main stages:
- Architecture
- Describing your design at various levels of abstraction. The most basic components, from synchronisers to simple processors, are written in an HDL, such as SystemVerilog; these are then combined (recursively) to form more complex systems.
- Simulation and Synthesis
- Simulation tests your design by emulating hardware matching the semantics of the HDL. Synthesis is the compilation of your design into a netlist, expressing it in terms of FPGA elements (e.g. wiring, LUTs, etc.).
- Software
- Processor architectures can run programs compiled to the appropriate binary (machine code) format. A binary is executed by reading its instructions from the device memory; some binaries may be incorporated into the device programming file, others uploaded dynamically.
A general overview is given by the following schematic; the labs provide greater coverage.

- Eclipse
- Software IDE. Includes a C compiler producing binaries (machine code) for the NIOS II processor.
- HAL
- Hardware Abstraction Layer. A NIOS II Eclipse project providing a low-level, memory-mapped interface to a specified architecture. The interface is basically a set of constants defining address ranges to which each component is mapped, and procedures to read and write data.
- Quartus
- Hardware IDE. Using an HDL, such as SystemVerilog, a Quartus project is a hierarchy of components or modules from a specified root. A complete project may be synthesised for programming onto a specified FPGA device.
- Qsys
- Qsys works at the component level of abstraction. A component in Qsys is a black box with a specified interface (wires), which can be connected together using a switched interconnect memory system. Each black box is ultimately a set of files in some HDL. Each Qsys project thus represents a hierarchy of Verilog components (much like a Quartus project), meaning it can also be treated as a component for use in another project.
- Modelsim
- Provides a simulation environment for (System)Verilog containing debug code (ignored for synthesis).
- Programmer / tPad
- JTAG is a communications protocol for on-chip debug (e.g. via a JTAG UART) and programming, using a standard group of dedicated pins. The FPGA is primarily configurable as a switch fabric and lookup tables, the former controlling connections between wires and the latter implementing custom functions. The control logic of each configurable element is memory-mapped to a dedicated SRAM module. An SRAM Object File (.sof), produced by a Quartus compilation, contains configuration data for each element, which is loaded via JTAG into the corresponding (volatile) SRAM module to (temporarily) program the FPGA.