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A VHDL Clock Made with ChatGPT: An FPGA-Based Project

If you’re new to FPGAs, Verilog, and VHDL, the challenge might seem overwhelming. ChatGPT can help you create your first FPGA project from scratch.

Up to now, I’ve never worked with an FPGA, and I did not know the Verilog language or VHDL. Read on and find out how ChatGPT helped me to create my first FPGA-based project from scratch.

Some time ago, I bought a DE10-Lite board from Terasic (Figure 1), containing an Intel MAX 10 series FPGA, a few 7-segment displays, slide switches, push buttons with hardware debouncing, LEDs, etc. All in all, a board that looked nice, and it was well-equipped for getting started. Theo Mulder’s recent article in Elektor got me thinking about FPGAs again. This special AI edition is the perfect opportunity to get started! I chose to use the VHDL language; refer to the dedicated text frame in to help you choose between VHDL and Verilog.

DE10-Lite development board - FPGA Project — Figure 1: The DE10-Lite development board

Among the electronics magazine projects that continue to bring inexplicable satisfaction decade after decade, clocks are high on the list. There’s something reassuring about watching the steady ticking of secon...