buymeacoffee.com/bml_khubbard...

Kevin Hubbard

I'm a digital chip designer specializing in ASICs and FPGAs. While my day job involves complex silicon, my passion lies in the open-source EDA movement. I believe that the tools to build the future of

buymeacoffee.com

Today I enhanced my Sump3 logic analyzer to let AI analyze millions of captured digital samples. A task far too time‑consuming for humans to tackle. In plain English, I asked "How many times does bsb_frm assert to logic-1 between the cursors". "10" It worked, first try, in spades. This is the way.

I did a YouTube podcast with Brian Tristam Williams of Elektor Publishing this week. Discussed my new book "Mastering FPGA Chip Design : For Speed, Area, Power, and Reliability" and also technology progression from 1970s to present day. It was fun and would do again. www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2xi...

Mastering FPGA Chip Design with Kevin Hubbard — EEI #56

YouTube video by Elektor TV

youtube.com

My book just showed up in the wild, in Germany! I am still waiting for my print copy to cross the big pond. I've only ever seen my original PDF manuscript, so this is very exciting. A REAL BOOK! It's about $35 for print or eBook versions. I worked very hard on this. www.elektor.com/products/mas...

In grade-school, middle-school and even early high-school, I dreamt of attending MIT to get a degree in Electrical Engineering. It just wasn't in the cards and I attended University of Washington. So glad I did. Everything worked out smashingly in the end. Serendipity.

I’ve completed my year-long journey to becoming a published author in electrical engineering. Mastering FPGA Chip Design: For Speed, Area, Power, and Reliability is now part of the Elektor Academy Pro series and available in both print and eBook formats: www.elektor.com/products/mas...

Mastering FPGA Chip Design

This book teaches the fundamentals of FPGA operation, covering basic CMOS transistor theory to designing digital FPGA chips using LUTs, flip-flops, and embedded memories. Ideal for electrical engineer...

elektor.com

Today I finished the last chapter on my manuscript. 28 chapters, 310 pages. It's been quite the year long journey. It's the one book that I have in me. I really hope it turns out well. Even if it doesn't, I know I gave it my best. It has been a personal and professional journey well worth taking.

Color text on my VGA graphics controller on a @digilent.bsky.social BASYS3 board! 1280x1024 with a 108 MHz dot clock. 4Kx18 RAM (72Kb, 2 BRAMs) for 80x32 text with 18 bits per text character. 8 bits for ASCII ROM. 5 bits each for Foreground and Background luminance(2) and color(3). Yay - It works!

This took all day. So frustrating. Backtracked a whole bunch trying to conserve BRAMs. Going to try and add some foreground color next with all the wasted BRAM bits. "Hello World!" digital style in 1280x1024 analog VGA.

Generating VGA video with nothing but logic gates, ASCII text on a 1280x1024 display with an Artix-7 FPGA ( @digilent.bsky.social BASYS3 board ). VGA is EXTREMELY forgiving. With a 100 MHz reference oscillator, 107.4627 MHz (900/8.375) is as close as I can get to a 108 MHz dot-clock. Not a problem.

Probably still my favorite computer. Got me through high school and the start of college. So much in such a little package ( for the time ). Even connected me to a VAX PDP-11. The Apple //c.

The more Python I write, the more I realize it is the most perfect and most likely the last computer programming language that I will ever learn after doing this for 45+ years now. Today was a very good day at BlackMesaLabs. I feel like that fictional "10x Engineer" bullshit.

I'm still hopping on Twitter every couple of days. I'm only there to post articles about Elon Musk though. What an awful person. Trump and Musk truly deserve each other. www.nytimes.com/2024/12/20/w...

Musk Expresses Support for Far-Right Party in Germany’s Election (Gift Article)

It was not the first online intervention by Elon Musk, the entrepreneur and adviser to Donald Trump, on behalf of once-fringe anti-immigrant parties in Europe.

nytimes.com

@woolaf.bsky.social Tom told me to follow you. What I've discovered over the years is that @radiofreetom.bsky.social is never wrong.

So my "retirement plan" from designing digital chips for profit ( ASICs and FPGAs ) since the 1990s is to stop at age 70 (2040) and just start writing software and fill up my GitHub site with useful free and open source Python programs. That's my dream anyways. I very well might be hallucinating.

Today, Yahoo killed "my.yahoo.com" that I had used for decades to track my stock portfolio. Pissed me off. So I wrote a program to replace it, "my_stock_watcher.py". It's WAY better than their old website. It's free. No ads. So Fuck You Yahoo. We're done. End Of Story. github.com/blackmesalab...

It brings me endless joy that Chat-GPT both knows about and correctly describes my open-source project.

I was going through some old photos and ran across one of my very first code review. The year : 1978. The reviewer : my mother.

@jentaub.bsky.social Happy Birthday!

We lost power (along with 1/2 million other Seattle area Eastsiders) last week when the "Bomb Cyclone" with 74 mph winds came through. It was 5 days total. Thankfully not in the dark or cold. Gas fireplace still worked and my solar charged battery bank kept us in light. Upgrading to LiFePO4 next.

Starting "America Against America" by Wang Huning. "An outlook of why US is potentially heading toward a decline. Published in 1991, still widely read amongst high level Chinese political figures and bureaucrats. Any serious student of US-China relations will benefit greatly from reading this book."

Certainly sucks to be the CFO of Twitter these days. It's a mass exodus from X. "The Guardian has announced it will no longer post content on Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, from its official accounts." www.theguardian.com/media/2024/n...

Guardian will no longer post on Elon Musk’s X from its official accounts

Platform’s coverage of US election crystallised longstanding concerns about its content, says Guardian

theguardian.com

@stonekettle.bsky.social has a new essay on that other social media website. Check it out. www.facebook.com/Stonekettle/...

Today I stayed off Twitter, and: No Tesla, drove my 1994 Honda. No WaPo, read The Guardian. No SpaceX into orbit, I never left Issaquah. No Starlink, just Xfinity ISP for me. No AWS, just a stack of old Linux laptops. I bought two books and 2lbs of coffee from Amazon. I wish I knew how to quit you.

I started something new: I am turning my FPGA blog series (link) into a book, "FPGA Chip Design for Speed, Area, Power, and Reliability." I even signed a contract with a publisher last month. I look forward to sharing with everyone when I am done in 2025. blackmesalabs.wordpress.com/2024/05/27/b...

BML FPGA Design Tutorial Part-Intro

Table of Contents:Part-1 : So what is digital logic design exactly?Part-2 : Using structural Verilog to make a working FPGA design.Part-3 : Using RTL Verilog and HDL to infer a working FPGA design.…

blackmesalabs.wordpress.com

My oldest daughter is 3rd generation UW Husky. She took me to the UW-USC game last night (26-21 Win!). I always enjoy going back on campus and seeing what is new and what hasn't changed. The Paul Allen Electrical Engineering building left of fountain is amazing. I love being back. Class of 1993.

This was my November 6th post on that other place. I'm still trying to figure out how to move forward.

New post on downloading and installing "free" Intel/Altera version of the excellent ModelSim Questa VHDL+Verilog simulator. I've been using this simulator professionally for 30 years now and it's great to have it up and running at home for hobby projects. blackmesalabs.wordpress.com/2024/04/21/m...

I have a new open-source project that dropped on GitHub. It's called SUMP3 and it's a scalable logic analyzer for FPGA chips ( or ASICs ). Secret sauce is real time HW compression and 2-wire interface to the capture blocks ( RLE Pods ). Read about it here: blackmesalabs.wordpress.com/2024/03/11/s...

I find it odd that we all don't have $500 sunglasses that act as 1080p displays for our iPhones and stream Roku TV shows direct to our eyes. People won't walk around wearing $1,000 ski goggles for this - Ray Bans though!. Is it only battery technology that is preventing this, or something else?