Overview
========
The CFU Playground consists of an opinionated configuration of hardware,
gateware and software. This page contains a short overview of all of it.
If this is your first time working with FPGAs or machine learning, then
we advise skimming this page briefly before moving on to :doc:`crash-course/index`.
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Hardware
--------
.. note:: We originally supported only the Arty A7 35T board, and the docs below have not
yet been updated. We now support many other boards -- check the Wiki!
The hardware is based around the Xilinx_ `Artix 7 35T`_ FPGA_. The Artix 7 has:
* 33,000 logic cells, which is sufficient for the soft CPU and quite a bit more
* 90 DSP 'slices', which can be used as multiply-accumulate units
* 50x 36Kbit block RAMs
We use the `Arty A7`_ development board. As well as the Artix 7, it has:
* 256MB external DDR DRAM
* a convenient set of switches, buttons and LEDs
* a USB serial connection for a host computer
* LGPL
.. _FPGA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_gate_array
.. _`Arty A7`: https://store.digilentinc.com/arty-a7-artix-7-fpga-development-board/
.. _Xilinx: https://www.xilinx.com/
.. _`Artix 7 35T`: https://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/fpga/artix-7.html
Gateware and CFU
----------------
We use LiteX_ to build a standard SoC (System-on-Chip) that runs on the FPGA.
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