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I turned my FPGA into an instrument capable of playing eight notes. The eight switches on the FPGA are set to correspond to a note in an A natural minor scale. When a switch is on, the FPGA outputs an 8-bit quantized sine wave corresponding to that note. The sine wave is then converted into an analog signal that drives a speaker.

I wanted to do a project that would introduce me to working with an FPGA. Making a note generator sounded very interesting to me and seemed well scoped for one person with no prior FPGA experience. I also like that there were many options for improvement beyond the minimum deliverable.

In order to generate a sine wave and convert it to an analog signal, I used a direct digital synthesizer. The DDS I implemented has four major components - a frequency reference (the clock), a phase accumulator, a sine lookup table, and a digital-to-analog converter.

The clock is the frequency reference that provides the timing for everything that the FPGA does. I chose somewhat arbitrarily to use a 50 MHz clock signal. The clock signal is generated by a silicon oscillator on the FPGA board.

The phase accumulator takes in the phase increment value and increments the phase angle by that much every cycle. For example, if the phase angle is n-bits and the phase increment value is 1, then it will increase the phase angle by 1*360^o/2ⁿ degrees every cycle. This means that the frequency of the outputted sine wave is determined by phase increment*f_clk/2ⁿ and the frequency resolution is determined by f_clk/2ⁿ.

A phase accumulator is included in the drop-in Sine LUT module provided by Xilinx, so I chose to use that rather than implementing my own.

The sine LUT is simply a lookup table that stores uniformly spaced samples of a sine wave. It takes in the phase angle from the phase accumulator as the address and outputs the sine.

In order to shorten the table and make it more space efficient, quarter and half wave symmetry can be exploited. This works because sin(a) = sin(pi-a) and sin(-a) = -sin(a). The two most significant bits of the angle are used for quadrant mapping, so it is not necessary to store values for all four quadrants in the LUT.

I used the sine lookup table provided by Xilinx in the CORE generator system. This automatically utilizes half or quarter wave symmetry based on what it determines is most appropriate.

I ended up using an R-2R resistor ladder as the DAC for my system. Using an R-2R resistor ladder is a very simple way to convert from digital to analog. It works by weighting the contribution of each bit to the final output voltage. The most significant bit contributes the most to the output voltage and the least significant bit contributes the least. Although this method is not as accurate as other methods, it was good enough for my purposes.