FPGA Thread: Bluespec SystemVerilog is now completely open source, very nice HDL although quite opinionated.
https://github.com/B-Lang-org/bsc
it's Haskell underneath (https://xkcd.com/356/)
FPGA dev board that's cheap, simple and supported by OSS toolchain
21–30 of 77 posts
Re: FPGA dev board that's cheap, simple and supported by OSS toolchain
#22How does this compare to alternatives for learning FPGA? What's the significance of the duino suffix? When would you choose FPGA over something like an STM32? From what an internet search leads to, they can be faster / do more things in parallel for the price. And you can add capabilities (More timers? More op amps?) with firmware updates. Is this at the core of when you'd choose one? I've no experience with FPGA, bu…
> More timers? More op amps?
FPGA's can't do that (or at least one's mere mortals can buy), but Cypress have a line of parts called PSoC (programmable system on chip) which can effectively synthesize analogue cells like op-amps in an analogous way to an FPGA. They also have a cut-down (surprised?) version of verilog, so you can write a few CPLD-y verilog modules to go on it as well.
The dev boards are very reasonably priced, well worth having one around to play with - can't comment on using them at scale. Cypress have some pretty good video lecture/tutorials on using them by Alan Hawse (Who is very stereotype-engineer https://youtu.be/0IKuUgEWAqg)
Re: FPGA dev board that's cheap, simple and supported by OSS toolchain
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Use the manufacturer tools (which, in this instance, are free) as using an "open-source toolchain" is NOT for beginners. As someone who learned the ropes with the open toolchain, I have to strongly disagree. It's perfectly feasible, and from what I've seen (videos and such), the closed toolchains are way messier and do not provide much in terms of tools unless you pay for time-limited licenses. No thanks.
I disagree, but please don't downvote stuff like this-- respond with a thought out comment, thanks. I upvoted you. Perhaps Xilinx-land is different, but I have seen an intern go from blank Windows machine to "blink an LED" on an Altera board in about an hour or so with no Verlog/VHDL. I have never seen this with the open-source toolchains. Your experience differs. YMMV. Disclaimers. etc.
I mean. The time for an intern to go from nothing to a blinking LED is not an interesting metric at all for a professional tool.
Re: FPGA dev board that's cheap, simple and supported by OSS toolchain
#24How does this compare to alternatives for learning FPGA? What's the significance of the duino suffix? When would you choose FPGA over something like an STM32? From what an internet search leads to, they can be faster / do more things in parallel for the price. And you can add capabilities (More timers? More op amps?) with firmware updates. Is this at the core of when you'd choose one? I've no experience with FPGA, bu…
> When would you choose FPGA over something like an STM32? The answer is "almost never". Qualifications below. Learn the Cortex-M4 ecosystem first . You can do a remarkable amount of stuff by abusing microcontroller systems in weird ways. The tools for dealing with microcontrollers are MUCH better than the FPGA ecosystem tools (which suck--and that's on a good day). If you need an FPGA, generally you know it. The fir…
I appreciate the direct answer - it sounds like it might still be worth learning from an academic perspective. Most of my project ideas are readily done with a Cortex-M and programmed in Rust, but I'm curious about Verilog/VHDL, even if just to expand horizons.
Re: FPGA dev board that's cheap, simple and supported by OSS toolchain
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Use the manufacturer tools (which, in this instance, are free) as using an "open-source toolchain" is NOT for beginners. As someone who learned the ropes with the open toolchain, I have to strongly disagree. It's perfectly feasible, and from what I've seen (videos and such), the closed toolchains are way messier and do not provide much in terms of tools unless you pay for time-limited licenses. No thanks.
I disagree, but please don't downvote stuff like this-- respond with a thought out comment, thanks. I upvoted you. Perhaps Xilinx-land is different, but I have seen an intern go from blank Windows machine to "blink an LED" on an Altera board in about an hour or so with no Verlog/VHDL. I have never seen this with the open-source toolchains. Your experience differs. YMMV. Disclaimers. etc.
It really depends on your prior experience. If you're a programmer that's used to working with a command line-based Unix environment, the open tools will feel a lot more familiar than the proprietary ones.
Re: FPGA dev board that's cheap, simple and supported by OSS toolchain
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Use the manufacturer tools (which, in this instance, are free) as using an "open-source toolchain" is NOT for beginners. As someone who learned the ropes with the open toolchain, I have to strongly disagree. It's perfectly feasible, and from what I've seen (videos and such), the closed toolchains are way messier and do not provide much in terms of tools unless you pay for time-limited licenses. No thanks.
I disagree, but please don't downvote stuff like this-- respond with a thought out comment, thanks. I upvoted you. Perhaps Xilinx-land is different, but I have seen an intern go from blank Windows machine to "blink an LED" on an Altera board in about an hour or so with no Verlog/VHDL. I have never seen this with the open-source toolchains. Your experience differs. YMMV. Disclaimers. etc.
For the record, just months ago I installed the open tools and did get to the led blinking in less than 10 minutes, with no prior Verilog experience.
I could count the time to "install open tools", too, but it would be even less favorable to the proprietary toolchain. It was, after all, a single command (on Arch Linux) that finished in a few seconds at worst.
There's a lot of tutorials these days based on iCE40 and open toolchain.
Then I went on to read yosys's documentation, and learned a great deal about how the flow from verilog to hardware works in a very short amount of time, by just doing so.
Re: FPGA dev board that's cheap, simple and supported by OSS toolchain
#27How does this compare to alternatives for learning FPGA? What's the significance of the duino suffix? When would you choose FPGA over something like an STM32? From what an internet search leads to, they can be faster / do more things in parallel for the price. And you can add capabilities (More timers? More op amps?) with firmware updates. Is this at the core of when you'd choose one? I've no experience with FPGA, bu…
> When would you choose FPGA over something like an STM32? The answer is "almost never". Qualifications below. Learn the Cortex-M4 ecosystem first . You can do a remarkable amount of stuff by abusing microcontroller systems in weird ways. The tools for dealing with microcontrollers are MUCH better than the FPGA ecosystem tools (which suck--and that's on a good day). If you need an FPGA, generally you know it. The fir…
I'm currently learning programming FPGAs using open source toolchain, my idea is to completely go away from MCUs towards cheap FPGAs and RISC-V. This is actually my third attempt to mess with FPGAs. Several years ago I tried Xilinx, before that I tried Altera. But their proprietary bloatware made me sick. Maybe I'm too much used to command line hence cannot comprehend their world-wide recognizable goodies. On the opposite I pretty much like Yosys, Verilator and SpinalHDL (I didn't like nMigen because of python). In my opinion, nMigen, SpinalHDL and other higher level HDLs are much more freindly to beginners than Verilog to which you are bound if you decide to go conventional way.
Re: FPGA dev board that's cheap, simple and supported by OSS toolchain
#28How about an FPGA dev board that's cheap, simple (or not really), supported by OSS toolchain and can emulate a RISC-V SoC with performance sufficient to run a fully-functional Linux desktop?
I once stumbled upon an article where somebody FPGA-ed (with a much bigger board, I don't insist it has to be this small and simple) a RISC-V system to make a "RISC-V PC" and I'm thinking about getting an FPGA to explore that since then.
Re: FPGA dev board that's cheap, simple and supported by OSS toolchain
#29Here's the board I still have from my student years. I'm curious how it compares to modern alternatives? I haven't kept up with that field at all: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/147963601.pdf
Take a look at the de10 nano. Crazy good board for the price. No OSS tool chain though.
To flesh this out, the de10 is a cyclone V board, so you actually end up with an ARM core/s to play with as well.
Lattice has a line called PolarFire which combines a fairly big FPGA and a RISC-V core, but they're very expensive, so I doubt I'll have my hands on one for a while.
If I ever luck into the big money, I know for sure I'm going to bankrupt myself buying toys like https://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/soc/rfsoc.ht...
Re: FPGA dev board that's cheap, simple and supported by OSS toolchain
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Use the manufacturer tools (which, in this instance, are free) as using an "open-source toolchain" is NOT for beginners. As someone who learned the ropes with the open toolchain, I have to strongly disagree. It's perfectly feasible, and from what I've seen (videos and such), the closed toolchains are way messier and do not provide much in terms of tools unless you pay for time-limited licenses. No thanks.
I disagree, but please don't downvote stuff like this-- respond with a thought out comment, thanks. I upvoted you. Perhaps Xilinx-land is different, but I have seen an intern go from blank Windows machine to "blink an LED" on an Altera board in about an hour or so with no Verlog/VHDL. I have never seen this with the open-source toolchains. Your experience differs. YMMV. Disclaimers. etc.
I think it took me about that long using the open tools. There is a 2 hour self-hosted beginner workshop for the icebreaker that gets you a little further than blinking.
Installation instructions (basically just extract the folder somewhere): https://github.com/im-tomu/fomu-toolchain
Workshop: https://github.com/esden/wtfpga