Jason Ellers, Utah Valley University
Engineering
Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology is becoming more popular among Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) developers. The ease of development and the maintainability makes FPGAs a very attractive option in many performance and efficiency critical applications. The purpose behind this project was to implement an arcade style game on top of a VGA driver. The project was developed on a Xilinx Spartan-3E Starter board using Verilog, a hardware descriptive language.
The project was started by learning the finer points of Verilog as well as becoming familiar with the Spartan-3E development board and the Xilinx ISE WebPack design software. A number of small, simple applications were developed in order to become comfortable with the development software as well as the basic principles of a VGA driver.
Verilog implementation of the classic Pong game was the first major development of the project. As this game was created in the early stages of the project, complexity was consciously avoided.
The aim of the second game, however, was focused on more technical features and other improvements. Plain monochrome images were replaced with colorful animations, sound output implemented, Nintendo game pads replaced the on board switches as user input interface and a several new modules were developed. The theme or style of the game was meant to resemble similar to the classic Space Invaders game; however, all graphic elements were designed from scratch.
The project is thought of as a starting point for learning hardware design in a practical sense. Extending the project to support more advanced features and better sound output may be implemented as a future project.