An Interview with Dave Vandenbout - Xceptional XESS Xenagogue

Welcome Dave Vandenbout of XESS!

• Though XESS is prounounced "Ex-Ess", the XuLA board is pronounced "zoo-la".
• Chris confused INXS and Styx. Sorry, classic rock fans.
• Dave worked at Bell Labs for 6 years in the late 70s and then went back to school at NC State to get his PhD.
• XESS started as a company writing spreadsheet software for the MicroVAX.
• This later turned into a one-man enterprise after Dave got sick of doing grant proposals and no hands-on research
• His first book (self published ) was The FPGA Workout. It detailed using the Intel FX780. The internal SRAM made it possible to embed a micro.
• This trend continued as Dave made hardware to go along with books. The Student EPX31 had an 8051 on board.
• Dave thinks tinkering with the Commodore 64 allows for comprehension of the system, but that's not as possible anymore.
• Xilinx vs Altera isn't really a big battle at XESS. Pick one, use it.
• The XESS boards help abstract out some of the hardware confusion by including the mapping file.
• The new(er) Stick It family allows easy expansion of peripherals.
• One good way to ensure you can build a system is to preserve the tools. Virtual machines are the best way these days.
• Dave (Jones) laments FPGAs having too many IO when sometimes you want a powerful part without the IO overhead (and cost).
• Rent's Rule - more gates, more IO
• These days, FPGAs are basically software companies.
• Another book that Dave has written is, "FPGAs?! Now What?" It's a great primer into getting started.
• More recently, Dave has been playing around with MyHDL, which uses Python to abstract out more of the design. This is in place of VHDL or Verilog. Dave wants to build a training course with Python Notebooks.
• To be a good designer, you really still need to know the hardware and how your code will generate. This also helps portability because you aren't using vendor specific macros.
• A small processor can be defined in a couple hundred lines of code.
• XESS code and projects are now kept on GitHub. The designs, including the hardware, are open source.
• Dave is in the middle of a transition from EAGLE to KiCad. Welcome to the fold.

Thanks again to Dave for stopping by and talking FPGAs with us. He has tons of great experience and makes a great product. You can find him on Twitter @devbisme, where he has been a member since the 555 contest! Or check out the XESS website for more info about tutorials and hardware.