Chapter 8: Lots of Data? MIG and DDR2

We've been working our way up toward a more functional design that can gather information, do some useful work, and present it in a meaningful manner. In previous chapters, we captured audio data and temperature data. We also looked at wrapping some of the interfaces so that we could use the IP integrator . The IP integrator also allowed for easily instancing floating-point operations. This has given us some functional designs, but we've been limited to using LEDs and then seven-segment displays, making it difficult to visualize information such as the PDM waveform data or even the temperature.

We have another option when it comes to displaying using our boards: the VGA connector. To effectively use it, we will need access to quite a bit of memory. To display 640x480 8-bit color, we would need 300 kilobytes, almost 1 megabyte for true color. We can certainly play some games to stretch out our memory, but alternatively, we can use the...