Ask HN: Getting Started with FPGAs on macOS

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I’m looking for recommendations for starting out with FPGAs on macOS: boards, software, setup, books, tutorials, etc.

From what I can tell, the usual tools don’t run on macOS and I will need to set up a VM with Linux or Windows. Is anyone working with FPGAs on macOS? How did you set up your machine and what tools / boards do you use? Thank you.

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Commercial development toolchains such as Vivado or Quartus require a Windows or Linux system. For me, it's easier to simply set up a separate Linux machine for FPGA development instead of setting up a VM.

However, you can use the open source Symbiflow toolchain (https://symbiflow.github.io) to develop Verilog-based systems (there's also a VHDL frontend now AFAIK) for Xilinx 7-Series, Lattice iCE40 and ECP5 FPGAs directly on macOS.

For symbiflow, I would recommend a Lattice-based board such as the ulx3s (https://radiona.org/ulx3s/) or icesugar-pro (https://github.com/wuxx/icesugar-pro), but the Xilinx Arty-7 boards also seem to be supported now.

Thank you! I'll look into those options.

I did a 2h live tutorial with FOMU [1] during the conference Teardown 2019 and it was a pretty good experience for me. I knew nothing about FPGAs and in a relatively short time I had a mini RISC-V OS up and running and I could compile programs at different level of abstractions.

I could recommend to take a look at their tutorials and see what's new/if there's support for newer boards.

But in terms of toolchain I really liked it and it worked flawlessly on Mac.

[1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/fomu

Nice! Thanks for the pointer.

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