Logan Five Thousand“An unexpected error occurred.”
Are there errors you were expecting to occur?
Saffron🏳️⚧️@LoganFive Story time! When I was playing around with video processors and FPGA builds with my previous job, there were a number of errors thrown during the (8 hour long) build process. Many of these errors were referred by the engineering team as "normal errors" and were an expected output. Also the thing worked fine despite having those errors.
sanfierro@spinach @LoganFive FPGA?! Do you have a blog or an article about that word of yours? It seems interesting
@sanfierro @LoganFive The wikipedia page should suffice: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_gate_array
Basically, it is a structure of generic logic gates (nowadays, typically 32 bit or larger ROM blocks) that are all interconnected. They can be programmed to do any arbitrary digital logic function within the timing constraints of the part, and can be programmed at any time (hence the name Field Programmable Gate Array). They are very very useful for any application where a generic processor is too slow.
Before these existed, the digital logic had to be spread across many basic digital logic chips, which consumed lots of PCB real estate, or a custom chip called an ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) had to be designed.
@spinach @LoganFive I'm sorry I made you explain what FPGA is, and I also appreciate your effort! I wanted to say "work" instead of "word" (so that it becomes "that work of yours"). So, I'm curious what you did on your previous work, why was an FPGA needed for the project there and what the project was, etc.
@LoganFive @sanfierro Ah okay! No worries. So it is under NDA so I can't really go into too much fine detail - but I was working on a video processor. Video processors take one or more video signals in (HDMI, DP, and SDI are typical), do some transformation on the signal(s), and then output one or more video signals. They are used at a pro level of production where low-latency in the video path is important. Think TV production, live sports games, and some high end AR applications. In these cases actual video processor hardware is necessary instead of using some sort of video editing suite such as AfterEffects, due to it being real-time. I was working on the video pipeline. There are lots of little individual steps within it, such as scaling, cropping, compositing, lens correction, dithering, etc. I was mostly applying performance improvements and adding new features into those individual blocks as part of an effort to make the processor better.
@spinach @LoganFive Thank you very much! I'm still curious about things like what kind of IDEs were used, what standards, etc, I understand you might not be able to talk about those. Anyway, what you said so far is interesting!
@LoganFive @sanfierro Typically the IDEs used for FPGA dev are provided by the chip manufacturer, so the one you use depends on which chip you have. Examples are Lattice Diamond and Xilinx Vivado. When your organization uses multiple brands of chips, typically the tools aren't portable so it becomes a massive headache to organize universal build tools. Also any timing standards are chip specific and manufacturer specific.