edalize VS oss-cad-suite-build

Check out FuseSoC: https://github.com/olofk/fusesoc which can handle Vivado builds for you (utilizing edalize: https://github.com/olofk/edalize) along with some nice package management. It can run against multiple tools so you can also get it to build simulations using Verilator or a commercial EDA tool if you have access to them.

Check out https://github.com/olofk/fusesoc. It gives you a command line build flow that can drive Vivado (along with many other eda tools via edalize https://github.com/olofk/edalize) without having to touch the GUI (though you might want it for programming the board, though FuseSoC can do that too).

This reminds me very much of edalize[1], which does something very similar.

[1]: https://github.com/olofk/edalize

The OSS CAD Suite [0] is a good open-source toolchain for this stuff. You can then write hardware designs in the SytemVerilog language (VSCode has some plugins, I believe, but I've just been using a basic text editor) and use the build toolchain to compile ("synthesize") and program e.g. an FPGA with your designs.

(FWIW, I've only just taken a class on Verilog this past Spring, but we used oss-cad-suite and I found it pretty straightforward to use. The bundled version of Verilator had some issues on my Mac though, so I had to compile my own copy of Verilator.)

[0] https://github.com/YosysHQ/oss-cad-suite-build/

I've followed this tutorial recently, and it's amazing:

https://github.com/BrunoLevy/learn-fpga/blob/master/FemtoRV/...

The author includes detailed instruction for how to build a micro-controller in Verilog on an icestick, starting from a very simple blinker all the way to a functional RISC-V core.

My other suggestion would be: for most of the toolchain, skip your package manager and directly install the binary artifacts published on this Github repo:

https://github.com/YosysHQ/oss-cad-suite-build

You'll spare yourself a world of pain.

You can compile and install from source or you can install the TabbyCAD software suite. It can be freely downloaded here: https://github.com/YosysHQ/oss-cad-suite-build.

I use a pre-built suite of tools from Yosys called the OSS CAD Suite, you can find binary builds at https://github.com/YosysHQ/oss-cad-suite-build

OSS CAD Suite gives you the absolute latest version of GTKWave (3.4.0), plus Icarus Verilog and a bunch of other stuff. On Windows though you need to use the start.bat or environment.bat scripts though to make the tools available in a command prompt.

There's a darwin-arm64 asset for https://github.com/YosysHQ/oss-cad-suite-build/releases at least. Installation is just 4 steps (see the readme). It just worked for me on Windows and Linux at least.

You’ll need to install the latest iverilog version. The easiest way to do that is to install https://github.com/YosysHQ/oss-cad-suite-build

I'm a macOS user that's recently been looking for a great FPGA development workflow for macOS. I recently discovered this collection. I liked that this was a nightly build but wanted a way to maintain the version of the tool suite used with my sources so I built a version manager for it here https://github.com/nishtahir/icicle. I'm still testing it and ironing out the kinks but would appreciate any feedback.

It also seems like YosysHQ's prepackaged OSS CAD Suite ships with the GHDL plugin, making installation a breeze compared to building from source (just extract the suite and add to PATH).

The other is oss-cad-suite which is a more traditional binary distribution in the form of a tar ball that you download, extract and add to your path.