Kevin Hubbard

Kevin Hubbard I'm a digital chip designer specializing in ASICs and FPGAs. While my day job involves complex silicon, my passion lies in the open-source EDA movement. I believe that the tools to build the future of

buymeacoffee.com/bml_khubbard...

Today I enhanced my Sump3 logic analyzer to let AI analyze millions of captured digital samples. A task far too time‑consuming for humans to tackle.
In plain English, I asked "How many times does bsb_frm assert to logic-1 between the cursors".
"10"
It worked, first try, in spades.
This is the way.

Don't know about Immich, but I love my Synology NAS drive! I store everything on it from my PCs and two Linux workstations. I love the peace of mind of having a Raid-1 Mirror. My 1st 2014 DS411 Slim lasted a decade. I replaced it with a DS225+ in 2025. Go $$ on drives. I got two WD's 1TB Red SSDs.

I actually got that. I must be getting old. Nobody gets my WW2 references anymore. Surrounded by children I am.

The thing for me with the 2nd election was this acceptance of "Well, this is what the Amerikan people really want in a leader."
Sad, Scary, and also Democracy.
I'm still left sitting in the back of the bus screaming of course.
I've just learned to accept it.

I still believe Air Marshal Arthur Harris should have been on trial as well at Nuremberg.

There also should really be a Linus Torvalds status somewhere in the world by now.

I want Bullet Trains, but I'm definitely an outlier American on that.

Yes. Hard to believe they also wrote "The City on the Edge of Forever"

One of those - "What did I just watch?" films.

I'm in favor of free and fair elections. I guess that may make me a screaming liberal these days. So be it.

On my bucket list! In the 1970's my family traveled Europe and the WW1 U-Boat at the Deutsches Museum in Munich left such an impact that I made sure to revisit in the 1990's while traveling to Israel for work. Truly amazing engineering for the time.

Way Cool! Das Boot is one of my favorite books.
The movie? Well, it's excellent too.
www.amazon.com/Das-Boot-Boa...

It hits home too. When "Carol" asks "Pirate Lady" (Zosia) a question, it reminds me of my daily correspondence with ChatGPT / Copilot AI LLM. The whole world collective knowledge through a single funnel.

I'm still very much enjoying it. The S1E3 hand grenade going off inside the house would have been more believable in terms of damage, but whatever. Rhea Seehorn is fantastic. After Better Call Saul, glad to see she landed star casting in her own show. Like Severance, it's new and fresh writing.

RE the book plate offer - still can't DM on either platforms. You appear to be blocked all around.

Thanks! For 2026, I'm attempting another manuscript. RISC-V System On Chip (SoC) design with Verilog and bare-metal C.

OMG - Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul are The Sopranos, The Wire, and Game of Thrones level of Television.
Very much worth the time investment.

Mastering FPGA Chip Design (E-book) This book teaches the fundamentals of FPGA operation, covering basic CMOS transistor theory to designing digital FPGA chips using LUTs, flip-flops, and embedded memories. Ideal for electrical engineer...

I wrote a book and managed to keep my day job.
www.elektor.com/products/mas...

I seem to recall a story about spending every last dime on a ferry ride to Nantucket or something to see friends with no means of getting to their house or paying for a return ferry home. Now that's how rich people travel.

Which gym, "24 Hour Fitness" maybe? I stopped "Anytime Fitness" when COVID hit. I'm just using the company gym these days, which is great. Lonely, but great.

A fallen tree was completely blocking my green-belt hiking path this morning. The funniest thing is there was no broken stump in sight. It's like the wind carried half a tree some distance.

Global clock buffering is generally difficult to implement - when you turn off your main clock, who turns it back on?
Regional clock buffering though is incredibly effective and easy to infer with modern synthesis tools. I make use of inferred regional clock buffering as much as possible.

The amount of load capacitance the clock input of a CMOS flip-flop represents. The C in CV^2F impacts power just as much as the F. It's easy to forget.

I enjoy the learning new things and fast-free writing blog stage. The final refinement into a book can be a grind. It's worth it at the very end of course.

BML Designing RISC-V SoCs with FPGAs : Part-Intro Table of Contents:Part-1 : What are SoCs?Part-2 : History of Modern Computer ArchitecturePart-3 : RISC-V Assembly LanguagePart-4 : RISC-V and the Femto corePart-5 : Femto-CPU Memory AccessPart-6 : …

System on Chip design in FPGA fabric using the RISC-V open-source CPU architecture out of UC Berkeley. Like my first book, it's starting out as an open-source blog series where I do all of my research and just free-write as fast as I can. Book comes after. blackmesalabs.wordpress.com/2025/08/31/b...

YouTube video by Elektor TV Mastering FPGA Chip Design with Kevin Hubbard — EEI #56

I did a YouTube podcast with Brian Tristam Williams of Elektor Publishing this week. Discussed my new book "Mastering FPGA Chip Design : For Speed, Area, Power, and Reliability" and also technology progression from 1970s to present day.
It was fun and would do again.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2xi...

Thank you. It feels fantastic! There are, of course, some things I would like to slightly change - as seeings things on paper versus a computer screen is a bit different. Water under the bridge though. I'll make those improvements on my second book!

Very sorry for your loss. Pets are such special family members.

My book just showed up in the wild, in Germany! I am still waiting for my print copy to cross the big pond. I've only ever seen my original PDF manuscript, so this is very exciting. A REAL BOOK!
It's about $35 for print or eBook versions.
I worked very hard on this.
www.elektor.com/products/mas...