SpinalHDL VS xfcp

I'd love to see textual preprocessors kinda banned. Or at least done upstream and outside of the language. You can't both be and also have a textual preprocessor defined internally. It doesn't work.

I really like what Zig and C++ are doing with `const`.

https://ikrima.dev/dev-notes/zig/zig-metaprogramming/

Have you looked at Spinal?

https://github.com/SpinalHDL/SpinalHDL

https://spinalhdl.github.io/SpinalDoc-RTD/master/index.html

Many companies do just write entire modern SoCs in straight Verilog (maybe with some autogenerated Verilog hacked in there) with no other major organization tools aside from the typical project management stuff. The load-store unit of a modern CPU alone easily exceeds 10k lines of Verilog. It's a similar thing as people who work with kernels—after all, the page table management code in a modern operating system like Linux is absolutely monstrous but still people are able to understand it well enough to be able to make the changes they need and get out.

If you are interested in other languages which hope to make this sort of stuff easier, I'd recommend taking a look at design productivity languages like Chisel and it's associated Chipyard [1], SpinalHDL [2], and Bluespec [3]. Each of these are meant to make defining extremely complex hardware more manageable for humans and there's a lot of interesting work going on right now with each of them.

[1] https://github.com/ucb-bar/chipyard

[2] https://github.com/SpinalHDL/SpinalHDL

[3] https://github.com/B-Lang-org/bsc

I have just found that SpinalHDL also implemented two halves of the fully registered buffer in Stream.scala.

Don’t forget SpinalHDL that was forked off of Chisel 2 I believe. These DSLs really leveraged the software features of Scala to help build generalised/modular systems. And are generally a quality of life improvement in the language features available.

A lot of reuse from other FOSH projects, including Litex, SpinalHDL, betrusted & u/alexforencich verilog-wishbone. Thanks to all of them :-)

You could try to implement a PCIe root complex for FOSS SoCs, connecting to e.g. Wishbone as the main bus. There's already some DDR3 controller (or this one) and USB Host controller out there, and even device-side PCIe, but no FOSS host-side PCIe that I know of. Probably quite a difficult job though, even sticking to the lower-speed PCIe 1.

This is exactly what I created https://github.com/alexforencich/xfcp for - Ethernet and serial to multiple internal components, with the ability to enumerate said components.

This is basically what I made XFCP for: https://github.com/alexforencich/xfcp

Simple interface framework for connecting Python to FPGA designs over a serial port or over Ethernet: https://github.com/alexforencich/xfcp .

I'll use my XFCP project to interface with the FPGA from Python via a USB serial chip. This provides access to the I2C bus on the board, for configuring the PLL chips and interfacing with the QSFP28 optical transceivers. Additionally, it connects to the dynamic reconfiguration ports (DRP) on the GTY transceivers, and I'll use that for performing BER measurements at 25 Gbps through a handful of QSFP28 cables and optical modules. It looks like I might also have to do some fine-tuning of some of the analog parameters on the transceivers (namely pre-emphasis).

I recently acquired a pair of rather large FPGA boards that have a bunch of high-speed IO. I figure it might be interesting to show the process for bringing them up in terms of the reference clock generation and distribution components on the board for the high-speed serializers, as well as performing some simple sanity checks (BER testing) on all of the interfaces to make sure everything is operational. I'll use my XFCP project to interface with the FPGA from Python for configuring the clocking components over I2C and for performing the BER measurements on the GTY transceivers via DRP.