Related pages on www.mikekohn.net: atmel rs232, atmel probe, picarus, msp430 guitar processor, 6581 Sound Chip, FPGA VGA, SX VGA, Atmel VGA, Bitbanging, Motor Control, Linksys Helicopter

Introduction

This is my first FPGA project. I got this Xilinx Spartan3 FGPA starter kit which came with 5 pins hooked up to a VGA port. Basically all it does is takes the 50MHz clock crystal and halves it to 25MHz. This creates a VGA clock where each pixel is 1 clock cycle. It uses a 10 bit counter for doing the horizontal timing and a 10 bit counter for the vertical timing. Using these counters it calculates when to apply voltage to the horizontal and vertical sync pins and data on the red, green, and blue pins. Coding was all done in VHDL (source code is below).

I have a video of vga2.vhd working on youtube.com: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcRCNr78GuQ.

Also, if you're interested in seeing how I implemented VGA in an SX microcontroller or an Atmel ATmega168 microcontroller, take a look at my SX microcontroller VGA and Atmel VGA projects.

Pictures

	This is the Spartan 3 starter kit from Digilent. (Click image for bigger picture)
	This is vga.vhd running on my old Gateway monitor. I didn't want to risk doing something dumb and blowing up a CRT I liked :). (Click image for bigger picture)
	This is vga2.vhd. This is an animation of a square changing colors really fast and bouncing around the screen. Maybe I'll post a video on youtube in the future. All source code is downloadable at the bottom of this page. (Click image for bigger picture)

Links

Source code

VGA Project 1: vga.vhd vga.ucf
VGA Project 2: vga2.vhd vga2.ucf