Design and Verify a 7-Segment Roaster-Console Display Controller
Overview
What this challenge is about.
Build a 7-segment roaster display controller with BCD decoding, PWM brightness, and time-multiplexed refresh. Fix flicker and earn a verifiable certificate.
The scenario
Maple & Ember Roasterworks builds commercial coffee roasters in Portland and is moving its console electronics in-house after field returns of a bought-in display module; specialty hardware shops at this scale increasingly favor small FPGAs and open-source toolchains to own and revise their display logic.
The Brief
What you'll do, and what you'll demonstrate.
Design, simulate, and bring up on a Lattice iCE40 FPGA a four-digit seven-segment display controller, with brightness control and binary-coded-decimal input, that resolves the flicker and brightness defects documented in the field incident file.
Earning criteria — what you'll demonstrate
- Implement a binary-coded-decimal to seven-segment decoder and verify it against every input value
- Design time-multiplexed digit refresh and brightness pulse-width modulation that avoid visible flicker
- Define and honor a clean signal interface between a microcontroller and an FPGA display block
- Build a self-checking testbench and read waveforms to prove timing and decode correctness
- Take a design from simulation through synthesis and onto iCE40 hardware with an open-source toolchain
Program Fit
Where this fits in your program.
Sharpens the same skills your degree expects you to demonstrate.
Aligned coursework coming soon.
Skills
Skills you'll demonstrate.
Each one shows up on your verified credential.
- Verilog
Apply verilog to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Fpga
Apply fpga to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Digital Logic
Apply digital logic to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Multiplexing
Apply multiplexing to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Pwm
Apply pwm to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Testbench Design
Apply testbench design to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
Careers
Career paths this challenge builds toward
Completing this challenge demonstrates skills that transfer directly to these roles:
FPGA / Digital Design Engineer
Building, simulating, and bringing up a display controller on real silicon mirrors the daily work of an FPGA engineer: writing synthesizable hardware, proving it in simulation, and validating it on a development board against a real-world failure record.
This challenge sharpens
- verilog
- fpga
- digital-logic
Embedded Systems Engineer
Defining a clean microcontroller-to-FPGA interface and driving a multiplexed display with brightness control bridges directly to embedded roles, where hardware and firmware must agree on timing, signals, and power behavior.
This challenge sharpens
- multiplexing
- pwm
- verilog
Hardware Verification Engineer
Writing a self-checking testbench that exhaustively covers decode values and timing, then confirming hardware matches simulation, is the core of a verification engineer's role: turning a specification and a defect log into reproducible passing evidence.
This challenge sharpens
- testbench-design
- digital-logic
- fpga