7seg s3e-sk extension board

I own a Xilinx Spartan 3E Starter Kit FPGA board. Something that is quite frustrating about it is that it has no 7 segment displays, and very few buttons. So i decided to build a simple extension board for it. The big Hirose connector on the side is quite hard to find, so i went with two 6-pin headers.

Obviously the 8 i/o ports provided by them could only connect a single 7(8)-segment display, but with adding a few shift registers and making the communication serial it is possible to add more. I only implemented 4 digits, but by daisy chaining more shift registers, it is possible to extend it even more very easily.

Downloads:

• Download hardware schematics:
  • gEDA - gschem files: Download
  • pdf file: Download

There are two pieces of code. one is written completely in verilog, and the other one is mostly schematic and a little vhdl.

• The verilog code implements a hexadecimal timer. All of the code including the driver is written in verilog. Download verilog
• The second, older piece of code is mostly schematic, with a few vhdl entities. This code implements a matrix multiplier. Download sch/vhdl for Xilinx ISE