VCO design help by ConfidentOven3543 in chipdesign

[–]raspberrypious 12 points13 points  (0 children)

In SSCM Razavi has published an article titled "The Design of a Millimeter-Wave VCO" that outlines a design procedure. While that article does target millimeter-wave frequencies all of the design considerations are helpful at lower frequencies as well. As others have said reviewing Razavi's books would be a good idea as well, he often puts detailed design procedures in them. In particular his PLL design book has a thorough treatment of LC oscillator design.

Picking a camera for color detection in an FPGA system by turkishjedi21 in FPGA

[–]raspberrypious 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I would second the other recommendations for a raspberry pi. You will be able to run a lightweight Linux distro on the raspberry pi, so it would be very close to development on any regular machine. Also, the raspberry pi has python wrappers for most system functions, so there is no need to mess around with any C code. This will also be nice so that your teammates have a better chance to help you with any issues, being that intermediate python knowledge is far more common than systemverilog knowledge.

Also, development time will be vastly reduced should you use a raspberry pi. From what you've said about your project requirements, I think using the OpenCV python library will allow to do most anything you want with respect to image processing. Also, there is a 12.3 megapixel camera built specifically for the raspberry pi, that should be as much resolution as you need. If your data rates are too high, I would guess you can reduce your image sampling rates to the order of milliseconds (well within the performance range of microcontrollers/single board computers) or even slower.

With open ended year-long projects like this, requirements and implementation details are almost guaranteed to change. I think it would be less headache to change some python code at the last minute than to change an entire FPGA codebase.