Last year at the HHV we rolled into town full of goodies in our bags. To excite people about hardware we demoed and gave away some FPGA boards to those in attendance. We realized quickly that people didn't understand what we were talking about or giving away...but seemed to really what we call the blinky light factor. It was then that we realized that something needed to be done about this, to educate the DEFcon attendees on how easy hardware really is. Too many people treat hardware like it is black magic which only few can wield. While it may be black magic, we feel it should be available to all to use. People need to learn that this black magic can be fun, exciting and easy. So we thought up a crazy idea to help some of you out. What if we just showed you how easy it was and went through, step by step, in actually building a device?
This tutorial/demo will go through the process of showing and teaching people how easy it is to rapidly design a hardware device using an FPGA. An FPGA is basically a programmable digital circuit. It can be programmed to be almost any digital circuit you like, replacing all your 7400-series chips with one small package. Starting with nothing more than an FPGA demo-board (and little to no knowledge of hardware) the audience will see how easy it is to make a device of their own. Through the use of free software and open source code, a device can quickly be assembled and programmed in a language such as C to do exactly what the user wants. The demonstration will also show the audience how to use free IP Blocks such as those provided by the OpenCores project to build their own cool devices equipped with all the peripherals they want. We will also demonstrate how to easily use Microblaze, a microprocessor written in Verilog/VHDL. Very recently the Microblaze architecture was added into the Linux Kernel (doesn't that sound like fun?!). This tutorial will overall show people how a $100 demonstration board can be used to design things like a logic analyzer (Retail: $20,000), your own 1980's style arcade game, a simple serial UART, that Ethernet sniffer you've always been dreaming, and whatever else your mind desires. By the end, people should be armed with the knowledge they need to design their own hardware devices and have no fear about doing so.
<strong>Fouad Kiamilev</strong> is a professor in the Department Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Delaware where he directs a group of pirates who call themselves CVORG (which stands for CMOS VLSI Optimization Research Group). Fouad's main mission is to train students to become successful participants in the 21st century global economy. Since 1997, he has advised 12 Ph.D. students and 16 M.S. students. His graduates are employed by leading academic and industrial organizations in the United States. Fouad's research group, CVORG, specializes in custom hardware design for special applications. As a hobby the group likes to tackle the security problems of today from a hardware perspective.
<strong>Rodney McGee</strong> is currently a graduate student in professor Kiamilev's research group (CVORG) at the University of Delaware. He is involved with numerous research projects that involve custom top to bottom system design. This often means creating analog/digital integrated circuits (VLSI), printed circuits boards (PCBs), software for hardware (VHDL, firmware, embedded code), custom hardware packaging (some that require cryogenic cooling systems), and other odd projects. All of this is made possible with the great support, knowledge, and experience from the rest of the group and his professor.