A practical guide for MCU developers making their first foray into FPGAs, covering five key mindset shifts: (1) HDL code describes hardware, not CPU instructions; (2) all I/O pins must be manually mapped via a constraints file; (3) the distinction between combinatorial logic (assign) and clocked logic (always blocks); (4) the difference between wires and registers in HDL; and (5) how all FPGA hardware operates in parallel rather than sequentially. Includes Verilog code examples and highlights common traps that MCU experience can cause.
