deca-mandelbrot

The Terasic DECA board as a mandelbrot accelerator. This is a hobby project to explore parallel computation/pipelining on a FPGA.

current status

• working: nine 72 bit fixed point mandelbrot cores run at 60 MHz
• still needs improvement: better resource usage, pipelining, more efficient USB data transfer
• basic interactive Gtk app works
• produces beautiful images:

how to build

$ ./initialize-python-environment.sh
$ . ./venv/bin/activate
$ python3 gateware/deca_mandelbrot.py --keep

how to run the testbench

$ cd gateware/
$ ./run-tests.sh

If you want to generate .vcd traces please set the GENERATE_VCDS variable in the file to 1