What are FPGAs anyway and why is it fun to play with them?

Speaker: Rudi van Drunen

Abstract

Programmable logic devices —a.o. FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays)— are a cheap way of building your own logic (hardware) that can be used as (very) fast processing devices, or just logic devices in your hardware design.

In this talk I will explain what FPGAs are and what you can do with them and how to develop hardware systems with them using Open source tooling. We will be using different tools, both graphical and a hardware description language to generate configuration for an FPGA. A short (live) demo will be provided.

Biography

Next to being dad and geek, Rudi tries to mold the technical part of the product creation process at SpronQ.

Rudi has more than 20 years of experience in the UNIX and open standards world, in large (data-centers) and small (embedded) environments.

He is an active member of USENIX and likes to visit conferences. In his spare time, he's into photography, sailing and travelling, and tries to combine this.

Twitter: @dvidur