Newbie project #2 - 16-element register file

[Corey Kosak]

Hi folks,

 

I thought I'd share my second project with you all. I just bought this book and got some more ideas from it. I ended up making a little 16-element register file and wrapping a "user interface" around it. I filmed a little video, and I've also attached the source files.

 

As I was doing this I noticed that the switches on the Papilio were not laid out in the order I expected. switch(0) is the leftmost when I expected it to be the rightmost. This is not a big deal--I could have RTFM'ed--but then I started thinking about how I wanted to deal with that. I might have edited my constraints file but I wanted to leave it alone. Instead I went looking for a way to reverse a logic vector in my design.

 

I expected something like this to work:

user_addr <= megawing_switches(0 to 3);user_data <= megawing_switches(4 to 7);

But that gave me the error "Line 30: Slice direction does not match type range direction."

 

So I ended up doing this, but I felt a little dirty.

rewire: for i in 0 to 3 generate  user_addr(i) <= megawing_switches(3-i);  user_data(i) <= megawing_switches(7-i);end generate rewire;

Is that really the simplest way to reverse a vector?

 

I had another fun weekend here. Thanks again for listening!

 

source.zip