f4pga VS f4pga-arch-defs

I hope AMD sees the light and helps F4FPGA develop a more complete open source toolchain for their FGPAs (https://f4pga.org). With this subsystem and an open source compilation flow, FGPA experiments would be way easier.

I tried to get LiteX to work with F4PGA, an open source FPGA toolchain, instead of the Xilinx tools, but it was a huge hassle. Just use LiteX with the Xilinx tools.

Not really, at least not apples-apples for something like a Pi.

There are a couple of different aspects to this, one is that soft-logic it typically slower than hard-logic so you just can't get comparable frequencies out of a soft implementation. For datapath designs, this is typically solved by going wider, but that isn't quite as helpful or practical for all aspects of a processor implemented in soft logic.

If you look at the specs for this softcore processor, they have much less performance than a Pi, even when you're using some of the biggest and more $$ families of FPGAs: https://www.xilinx.com/products/design-tools/microblaze.html....

I'd say that is on-part with similar complexity soft-core CPUs from other vendors or even open-source ones.

With respect to the design transparency, it kind of depends on how much you care about the black-box compilers required to use a lot of these advanced chips. You can feed open-source RTL into them, but there's still a proprietary black-box compiler/fitter/place-route etc for a lot of these.

There's some work toward open toolchains from yosys and https://f4pga.org/, but none of the big FPGA companies seem very bought-in or willing to help a, so it's been a community best-effort, and for some of the fancier devices, you still have to use the proprietary tools to build bitstreams.

I am a believer that the open source days will come: https://f4pga.org/

QuickLogic [1] seems to support and target the open tool environment for their devices -especially the F4PGA [2] toolkit (known earlier as symbiflow). Others have mentioned Lattice FPGAs. But the impression I got from Lattice is that they like the development of open tools, but don't want to invest too much in it. QuickLogic on the other hand, contribute code and design directly to F4PGA project and allied ones like Migen.

[1]: https://www.quicklogic.com/software/qorc-mcu-efpga-fpga-open...

[2]: https://f4pga.org/

I note that F4PGA (formerly SymbiFlow) Project X-Ray folks are documenting Xilinx FPGAs, hopefully you will be able to replace your use of Vivado at some point:

https://f4pga.org/

FPGAs would be so much more useful if AMD(Xilinx)/Intel(Altera) just gave up trying to build there own tools and instead supported F4FPGA: https://f4pga.org

Have you looked at F4PGA? They are working on exactly that.

https://f4pga.org/

F4PGA In the world of FPGA tools, it is refreshing to be able to use the suite of open source tools provided by F4PGA. For now, it supports only Xilinx 7-Series, Lattice iCE40, Lattice ECP5 FPGAs and QuickLogic EOS S3 but the team behind the projet is working to support more targets.

F4PGA: Open FPGA Tooling: Xilinx 7-Series, Lattice iCE40/ECP5, QuickLogic EOS S3\ (19 comments)

In addition to open-source FPGA toolchains (e.g., https://f4pga.org/, GHDL, Verilator, Yosys, IceStudio, etc.), you _can_ actually run vendor/commercial tools (e.g., AMD/Xilinx Vivado) on M1/M2 macs, through virtualization (VM, or containers). Until quite recently, the only available option to run x86_64 on macOS/arm64 was QEMU (e.g., UTM, docker, lima). It worked but was pretty slow, especially for mammoths like Vivado, larger designs, and in case you needed the GUI. With the release of Ventura (currently at final betas), it’s possible to run Linux x86 binaries using rosetta 2, which is way faster than QEMU. I currently run Vivado 2022.1 on macOS/M1 Ventura, using UTM (https://mac.getutm.app/). It’s 100% usable and feels even faster and snappier than my Linux machine!

There are some FPGAs that have been _fully_ reverse engineered and now have open source toolchains, such as Lattice iCE40 and Lattice ECP5(-5G). Others are coming along, such as Xilinx 7 series and Lattice's Nexus FPGAs (CrossLink and Certus products).

See: https://f4pga.org/

As far as boards go, there are many, many out there. Some of my favorites are:

Alchitry Au: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/16527

Olimex iCE40HX8K-EVN: https://www.olimex.com/Products/FPGA/iCE40/iCE40HX8K-EVB/ope...

ECP5-5G evaluation kit: https://www.latticesemi.com/products/developmentboardsandkit...