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Comment by adwn | Hacker News Reader

As much as I wish this would come true, there's little chance for a full, end-to-end open source toolchain for Xilinx or Altera FPGAs that's competitive with the vendor tools. The reason for this is that there's no publicly available documentation of the signal routing configuration or the bitstream format, which are required for the final two steps in the chain. I don't see the two market leaders releasing this information anytime soon, and reverse engineering it from the data files is probably rather difficult.

The synthesis discussed in the linked page is one of the earliest steps, and from the point of view of open source implementations, the simplest one, because all necessary information is freely available.

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"there's no publicly available documentation of the signal routing configuration or the bitstream format"

Both of things either have already been reverse-engineered, or are in the process of being reverse-engineered.

The reverse engineering efforts are impressive (though as I understand it, limited to Xilinx series 7 and Cyclone V) but without robust and reliable timing data to go with the rest of the chip data, they can't give you the same level of confidence that a design will work across a range of a devices and operating conditions.

For the curious: the process of discovering the logic and route timings for an FPGA device is to use ring oscillators (three series inverters) and compare counters against a known clock. Place the inverters all over to test every LUT, and use every routing path to test each path's timing.

> Both of things either have already been reverse-engineered, or are in the process of being reverse-engineered.

Please provide a source for this claim. Yosys, for example, can't route [1] designs even for Xilinx 7-series devices, and that architecture has been introduced 15 years ago.

[1] Not to be confused with synthesis, mapping, or placing, all of which come earlier in the flow, and for all of which sufficient information is public available.

Yosys doesn't do place-and-route - typically that part would be handled by nextpnr, and there's an experimental fork of that for Xilinx series 7 devices: https://github.com/openXC7/ (full toolchain)

It works well enough to build a working litex RISC-V SOC capable of running Linux, for the QMTech Kintex-7 325T board.

I don't think the Cyclone V project has got as far, but I could be wrong. (It kind of slipped off my radar after I realised I was spending way too much time on Discord and purged all but a very few servers to reduce my distractions.)

They seem to be pushing in that direction. Here's Altera's latest: https://github.com/OFS

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