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Comment by steponlego | Hacker News Reader

Is there an FPGA with a totally Free and Open toolkit yet?

As others have already mentioned the Lattice ice40 family is supported by OSS chains through project icestorm [0].

There were some nice boards floating around though you may have to watch out for supply chain issues still plaguing this market. Examples:

- icoboard: has the 8k LUTs chip, comes with soldered PMODs[1], if you get it watch out as you either need a RaspberryPI with GPIOs soldered to program it, or you purchase their USB FTDI interface in addition. See: http://icoboard.org/

- iCEBreaker, comes with the 5k LUTs chip, has the USB-FTDI interface built-in, but you need to solder the PMODs yourself. See: https://www.crowdsupply.com/1bitsquared/icebreaker-fpga#prod...

[0] https://github.com/YosysHQ/icestorm

[1] https://digilent.com/reference/pmod/start

Lattice ECP5 devices are also supported by open tools.

I've had good experiences using Upduino 3.0 and 3.1 [0] with the IceStorm tools via apio [1]. I wrote a blog post [2] with some info on getting things set up via Linux. All you need is the Upduino board, which interfaces to your host system via USB (so no special programmer is needed).

[0] https://tinyvision.ai/products/upduino-v3-1

[1] https://github.com/FPGAwars/apio

[2] https://daveho.github.io/2021/02/07/upduino3-getting-started...

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/

Yep. I'm using the iCE40HX FPGA on an open "source" Olimex Board [1] and my toolchain is all free and open source tools: yosys, arachne-pnr (which is replaced by nextpnr, but I haven't upgraded yet), flashrom, iceprogduino, iverilog.

[1] https://www.olimex.com/wiki/ICE40HX1K-EVB

Yosys, the underlying compiler of ice studio, also targets the much bigger ECP5 FPGA, also by Lattice, which is called Project Trellis: https://github.com/YosysHQ/prjtrellis

Yosys functions more like a software open source tool. So command line compiling. It also has a REPL. It is very quick compared to the commercial solutions. Especially around compile times which can take seconds instead of minutes. YMMV, but I think the consensus is that it's a lot more convenient to use.

In general the hardware toolchains feel very ancient compared to software toolchains.

Yosys / project Trellis and nextpnr are amazing - I've played with them using an IceSugar-Pro board (which despite its name has an ECP5-25 FPGA) - but there's also an experimental branch for Xilinx 7-series devices now - Project X-ray, with an even more experimental branch of that targetting the Kintex7-325 FPGA on one of the QMTech (AliExpress) boards. That's of particular interest since that FPGA is large / high-end enough not to be supported by the free version of Vivado!

I believe there's a foss toolchain for the Lattice ice40 series (?)

Not sure how many boards supported but you can take a look to Icestudio https://icestudio.io/

https://rapidsilicon.com

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