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Today, February 15th, 2020, marks the official 30th Anniversary of JTAG. What a wild ride it has been โ€“ from its humble beginnings for detecting short and open circuits, it has evolved to be, in some ways, the most powerful and feared technology on the planet. How did we get here?
In Episode 2 of the Basys Chronicles, I configured (programmed) the Artix-7 FPGA with a simple Binary-to-Decimal calculator application, through the USB-JTAG port. But, power down the Basys 3, and it goes back to the Built-In Self Test that comes with the board. This week, I flashed the calculator configuration into the nonvolatile SPI flash, making it the default boot-up configuration.
In the Basys Chronicles Episode 1, I started to learn about FPGA programming using Xilinxโ€™s Vivado tool and the Digilent Basys 3 Trainer Board. Now, after a few weeks (okay, time flies; itโ€™s been almost two months), Iโ€™ve made some good headway in understanding FPGA architecture and creating some interesting designs that do useful things.
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