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Aegis – open-source FPGA silicon

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1–10 of 46 posts

Re: Aegis – open-source FPGA silicon

#3
Neat project - there are already a couple of good open FPGA projects. Have a look at Dirk Koch's and the FABolous teams work. They are doing exceptional work.

But all open FPGA projects miss the IO required for a good design. They do not have any serdes hardware nor DDR IO cells.

Re: Aegis – open-source FPGA silicon

#4
post #3

Neat project - there are already a couple of good open FPGA projects. Have a look at Dirk Koch's and the FABolous teams work. They are doing exceptional work. But all open FPGA projects miss the IO required for a good design. They do not have any serdes hardware nor DDR IO cells.

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Re: Aegis – open-source FPGA silicon

#5
post #3

Neat project - there are already a couple of good open FPGA projects. Have a look at Dirk Koch's and the FABolous teams work. They are doing exceptional work. But all open FPGA projects miss the IO required for a good design. They do not have any serdes hardware nor DDR IO cells.

This project seems to have a serdes block which seems to wrap whatever is in the PDK. Didn't look too far down but from a cursory glance it looked like it was built for an internal clock of 50 MHz (clock default to 20 ns) with an oversampling of 8: 400 MHz

If those numbers are at all right it puts it in useful territory. Very much so for a first spin

For a first spin it looks overall pretty useful. The only nitpick I have would be that `operation` on the DSP tile should be from fabric instead of config (hardcoded in bitstream) otherwise I don't see a convenient way of resetting the accumulator(?)

Re: Aegis – open-source FPGA silicon

#8
post #3

Neat project - there are already a couple of good open FPGA projects. Have a look at Dirk Koch's and the FABolous teams work. They are doing exceptional work. But all open FPGA projects miss the IO required for a good design. They do not have any serdes hardware nor DDR IO cells.

This project seems to have a serdes block which seems to wrap whatever is in the PDK. Didn't look too far down but from a cursory glance it looked like it was built for an internal clock of 50 MHz (clock default to 20 ns) with an oversampling of 8: 400 MHz If those numbers are at all right it puts it in useful territory. Very much so for a first spin For a first spin it looks overall pretty useful. The only nitpick I…

Thanks for the suggestion on the DSP. Maybe I'll add new DSP tiles that are reconfigurable and keep the config based DSP tiles. I designed Aegis's Terra 1 to be a "good enough first gen" so that's why things are the way they are. I didn't want to over commit on the design for a first generation.

Re: Aegis – open-source FPGA silicon

#9
post #3

Neat project - there are already a couple of good open FPGA projects. Have a look at Dirk Koch's and the FABolous teams work. They are doing exceptional work. But all open FPGA projects miss the IO required for a good design. They do not have any serdes hardware nor DDR IO cells.

Yeah, I did see there's been attempts but none really satisfied what I wanted out of it. I do know of FABulous and it seems good but not quite what I wanted. You can see that aside from yosys and nextpnr, it is quite self contained and even provides a very easy way of defining new silicon with Nix.

I know that IO is really the 2nd thing which sells FPGA's. I did design a basic serdes hardware that should just work for this first generation. I do want to do DDR IO cells in the future.

Re: Aegis – open-source FPGA silicon

#10
As someone who has only dabbled with FPGAs before, this is incredible to see all the steps end-to-end for silicon development! I feel like the articles I've read always leave out details in one part or another, so it's interesting to see all the nix dependencies and build steps.
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