Blog

Introduction Happy New Year! It’s 2026 and VHDL interfaces, a new feature added in the 2019 language standard, are finally ready for prime-time. VHDL-2019 interfaces solve one of the most painful problems in large VHDL designs: cleanly connecting wide, repetitive interfaces like AXI-Stream, AXI-Lite, or AXI-Full. Until recently, two barriers prevented their use: non-existent synthesis tool support and expensive paid-only simulator support. After spending December developing a set of general-purpose AXI-Stream modules built around interfaces, I can confidently say that both Vivado (synthesis / implementation) and NVC (open-source simulation) now have solid support. VHDL interfaces are ready for new designs in 2026. ...

Introduction Taking a disciplined approach to managing an FPGA project may ever-so-slightly slow you down at the beginning stages, but it pays dividends through the life of the project. There is never just one released version of a professional FPGA project. Projects evolve over time, and your version-tracking scheme should support that. Tracking FPGA build and version information in a clear and repeatable way takes all the guesswork out of trying to remember if the bitstream that you currently have loaded is the one from yesterday or the one from today. If you have a separate software team writing code for your FPGA, they’ll thank you for including precise versioning data with each build. ...

Introduction Today I want to talk about the typical project / repository structure that I use for efficiently managing the build tools on customer projects. Every project is a bit unique in its own way, so this structure is intentionally flexible, allowing for project-specific script edits where needed, while still being general enough to work in 99% of cases for my usual workflow. Its been slowly developed and tweaked over the years as I add new tools into the mix and make improvements to fix old shortcomings. This structure has evolved with just about every project, so I’m sure this isn’t its final form, but its at a place where I’m happy enough with it to share it. ...

What’s an FPGA? An FPGA is a reconfigurable digital logic IC (Integrated Circuit) often used for highly parallelized computing and custom interfaces to bespoke hardware. You’ll usually find them in specialized, lower-volume systems where high throughput or low latency is critical - applications like datacenter, networking, RADAR, aerospace & defense, medical devices, 5G / wireless communications, scientific research, AI accelerators, imaging, and test / measurement instrumentation. What are they good at? FPGAs hit a sweet spot by delivering performance that pure software can’t match, without the up-front cost of an ASIC, all while retaining most of the system flexibility offered by software. FPGAs also offer some unique security features that make them attractive to specific markets. ...

Hello World Shrikebyte is a small, independent consulting firm focused on delivering fast FPGA and SoC systems. It consists of one employee ~yours truly~ and one very supportive wife, who this wouldn’t be possible without. I’m David Gussler, an experienced FPGA design engineer, who graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. I’ve worked for the largest of defense contractors, small bleeding-edge startups, and somewhere in-between at times throughout my career. I love chopping through bureaucracy to get difficult FPGA, embedded programming, and digital signal processing work done, and I knew that I’d be perfectly positioned to help do the same for other companies as an independent contractor. I’ve been fortunate enough to have a few key customers encourage me to start doing this full-time, so I took the plunge, and now here we are… ...