Digital oscilloscope on a FPGA project
An oscilloscope is a “must have” tool for everyone who is involved in electronics. Digital Storage Oscilloscope (DSO) would be best choice for hobbyists as they are pretty cheap and has many handy features for wide range use like various digital filters, customizable triggering, huge memories for storing scope history and other features that can fit in to FPGA. Here is a DSO project developed by Cornell University students. Their goal was to construct FPGA based oscilloscope that could work at 20MSps and has small count of external components. As input they used a delta-sigma ADC chip AD7401, while other part was simulated in FPGA.
Signal output was generated as VGA signal with 640×480 resolution. So simple PC monitor could be used. Additionally they developed an interface to Nintendo DS so the trace could be seen on dual TFT 256×192 with capture capability. Perhaps this scope wouldn’t be much useful, unless using example for further developments, but still this is great resource to study FPGA capabilities. Another great DSO project that was used as a reference can be found here.



