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Does anyone know any good sources for information on VHDL functions? My group has to write a seven page paper on figuring square roots by digit recurrance, and what we have so far is pretty thin. All of our searches have turned up very little so far, and we've reached the point of beating our heads on the table.

Thag wrote:Does anyone know any good sources for information on VHDL functions? My group has to write a seven page paper on figuring square roots by digit recurrance, and what we have so far is pretty thin. All of our searches have turned up very little so far, and we've reached the point of beating our heads on the table.

Your question is ambiguous. Are you trying to figure out how to do this in hardware (such as on an ASIC or an FPGA,) or if it's possible, or what?

Also, try Google Groups which is the quick and dirty way of getting to usenet. Here, I've pointed you to comp.lang.vhdl which is the group dedicated to the VHDL language. You can also look up comp.arch.fpga, which is a group more oriented to the specifics of hardware design with FPGAs.

Sorry about that. What we're trying to do at this point is basically research the function itself. We know it works, what we need to do is write a detailed report outlining how it works from both mathematical and hardware standpoints. Eventually we'll have to do a program demonstration in VHDL language (using the Vsim program), but I think we have a good enough idea on how to set one up. We have some basic stuff to work with right now, but not enough for seven pages worth of report. Does that clear things up at all?

Thag, we have a forum for these questions.
Gaming & Computers
You have a better chance at a good answer there, because you might get someone like me answering in utter gibberish, as opposed to the useful gibberish the hand out in G&C.

Sorry. I figured it would fit better here since it had hardware and math parts as well.

Don't worry, you're under a thousand posts so we can't flame you for not knowing.

Thag wrote:Sorry about that. What we're trying to do at this point is basically research the function itself. We know it works, what we need to do is write a detailed report outlining how it works from both mathematical and hardware standpoints. Eventually we'll have to do a program demonstration in VHDL language (using the Vsim program), but I think we have a good enough idea on how to set one up. We have some basic stuff to work with right now, but not enough for seven pages worth of report. Does that clear things up at all?

Odd, that sounds like a decent-sized report by itself, unless you're doing your report in eight point font, single-spaced. Though, the mathematics themselves are straightforward, I'd guess. Are you looking at just one hardware algorithm? Or do you have others you can compare and contrast. Other things to look at is how you might structure your VHDL for optimizations in resource utilization, and/or in execution times, or perhaps in what sort of hardware system you'd do this in (there are DSP applications which could concievably use square roots, for example . . . and there's a lot under the DSP umbrella.)

No, we only have one hardware algorithm to work with. We have a handout from our prof which covers most of the algorithm as well as some of the calculations involved, but it doesn't explain where it's pulling its variables and equations from very well (basically, he photocopied a book and gave one chapter to each group). Unfortunately, we're on spring break right now and most of my classmates, the prof, and the t.a. are not reachable.

(Btw, thanks for the help. Up until this semester, we'd only heard a few things about this subject, now we're getting it full in the face.)