Introductory course to VHDL and HLS FPGA programming

June 23, 2025

This week the BondMachine project will be among the arguments of an introductory course to VHDL and HLS FPGA programming, organized by the ICSC (International Center for Scientific Computing), INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare) and several italian Universities. The course is aimed at students and researchers interested in learning the basics of FPGA programming using VHDL and High-Level Synthesis (HLS) techniques. The course will cover fundamental concepts of FPGA architecture, VHDL syntax and semantics, and practical examples of HLS programming. There will be also hands-on sessions where participants will have the opportunity to implement simple FPGA designs using VHDL and HLS tools, BondMachine will be used as a practical example to demonstrate how to design and implement custom FPGA architectures.

The course will be held at the University of Milano-Bicocca (Unimib) from June 23 to June 27, 2025. The course page can be found here: Introductory course to VHDL and HLS FPGA programming

For the course, we set up a dedicated GitHub organization with several repositories for the different days that contain all the lecture materials, slides, and example codes: 2025 FPGA Course GitHub Repository

We also set up dedicated resources to allow participants to practice FPGA programming without needing to install any software on their local machines. This includes cloud-based FPGA development environments and pre-configured containers that are accessible via web browsers. The setup is quite satisfactory and will be made available to the public as a github repository after the course.

The course is the first part (the introductory one) of a more advanced course on FPGA programming that we will host in October 2025 in Perugia, Italy.