Task

The final project for my ENR 157 Digital Systems class tasked us with simulating the operation of a microwave oven per a specification using the DE-10 FPGA dev board and Quartus Prime software.

Design

Having been recently introduced to VHDL but with little experience I wanted to see the capabilities of the language beyond our class assignments so electec to implement all of the features in a custom module which was then inserted into the system schematic and assigned to pins on the board. Many functions of the simulator project were significantly easier and quicker to implement in VHDL than they would have been by drawing a block schematic though during the later stages of development I ran into numerous issues that stemmed from the one custom module having too many tasks causing the "wires" to get crossed and experiencing issues where parts of the project would stop working for seemingly no reason and re-compiling it with no changes would cause things to start working again. With some guidance from my professor we got the program working just well enough to pass the assessment though it was very volatile and un-predictable. This experience taught me a lot about what use-cases VHDL excels at and generally the importance of selecting the correct tool for the task.

The code is available on my GitHub and I am working on improving the reliability as my time allows. The image below is version 1.0 of the system circuit at the time of submission.

Result

The microwave simulator passed the assessment with all functions working as described by the specification and I presented my project at MCC's Engineering Day 2022 representing the ENR157 booth.