Recently I saw the LOL Shield .. an Arduino Shield with lots of LEDs. This shield uses chalieplexing, a technique which allows you to drive a big LED matrix with a small number of I/O pins. If you’re wondering how does it work, here’s the key concept: tri-state logic.
I have been very amazed by the STM32 microcontrollers from ST Microelectronics, which feature a 32 bit ARM core and all kinds of peripherals (12 bit A/D converters capable of a few MSPS, 12 bit D/A converters, 32 bit timers, I2C, SPI, CAN, UART, USB, Ethernet MAC, etc.).
ZPU is a very interesting soft core processor designed to take as little FPGA resources as possible, leaving you a lot of space for peripherals and hardware accelerators. It’s a modern stack based 32 bit CPU, the implementation is independent of the FPGA model and it can also be used in other technologies (e.g. anti-fuse, ASIC).
Most of the classical materials teach you to use separate power supplies and connect the digital ground (DGND) with the analog ground (AGND) in a single point. But is it sufficient ? No, it’s not, since you can have high frequency interference that propagates through the ground, from the digital circuits to the analog ones.
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