https://hardwarehax.com/categories/ml/ Recent content in ML on Hugo -- 0.147.7 en-us Fri, 30 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://hardwarehax.com/posts/mcp_xilinx1/ Wed, 21 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://hardwarehax.com/posts/mcp_xilinx1/ <p>To this day, I have my first FPGA development kit with a Spartan-3 chip on board. I purchased it somewhere around 2004. Those were the days when Xilinx (today an AMD brand) provided the ISE development environment based on TCL scripts.</p> <figure class="center"> <img loading="lazy" src="spartan.webp" alt="My meeting with the FPGA technology for the first time. I love this Spartan logo" width="100%"/> <figcaption> <p>My first Spartan S3 kit from Digilent</p> </figcaption> </figure> <p>Fast forward to 2026. The Spartan-3 chip has passed into history along with the ISE environment, which was replaced by the Vivado/Vitis combo. Through these nearly three decades, lithography technology has changed, enabling the creation of more efficient (in terms of speed and energy) chips. The functionality of the chips has also significantly expanded - it is no longer just FPGA structures with a synthesized MicroBlaze processor - but ready-made <strong>System on Chip</strong> systems that contain a combination of an ARM processor (PS block) with an FPGA structure (PL block).</p>