FPGA programming

I spent last week in San Jose, taking a course on VHDL programming at Xilinx Corporation. VHDL stands for VHSIC Hardware Description Language and is used for FPGA programming. FPGAs are Field Programmable Gate Arrays and are a special class of chips which can be programmed at a gate by gate level thus giving speed and flexibility without having to design a custom chip for applications. In high energy physics these are used to organize and label data as it comes at high speeds from various detectors. For instance Muon Tracking Arms in PHENIX use FPGAs. In addition they can also be used to make fast trigger decisions, for instance if we are trying to detect J/y particles we need to make quick decisions as to whether or not high speed muons were seen in a given event (say Au+Au collision).

We took the course at Xilinx campus in San Jose, CA. I must say Xilinx has one of the best cafetarias that I have ever come across. The food was really good and relatively inexpensive (although I am told it is subsidized). I wish we had a cafetaria like that in Los Alamos instead of the one we have run by Aramark (for those who do not know, Aramark is one of those big food industry corporations, which seems to have a stranglehold on all government contracts in US as they have the same standard fare at Brookhaven National Lab and probably many others).