[libre-riscv-dev] Open-Source FPGA toolchains

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Saturday, January 26, 2019, Jacob Lifshay <programmerjake at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I found this interesting linux.conf.au talk on the current state of
> open-source fpga toolchains:
> SymbiFlow - The next generation FOSS FPGA toolchain
> https://youtu.be/-xyAauPa__s
>
> If we need to get another FPGA to work on, I think we should get a Lattice
> ECP5 FPGA since they can be quite big, are not extremely expensive, and
> they have mostly complete support in the open-source toolchain (much better
> than Xilinx 7 series at least).


Awesome. Bunnie Huang points out in a comprehensive post that the libre
tools are ridiculously more efficient in the precompile phase, something
like 80% more effective. The disincentive being for secret proprietary
tools: efficiency terminates sales!

https://www.latticesemi.com/Products/FPGAandCPLD/ECP5

85k LUTs. Lots of memory. No idea in practical terms what it all means :)

http://www.latticesemi.com/en/Products/DevelopmentBoardsAndKits/ECP5EvaluationBoard

Well that's stupidly cheap. Dang. $99. Might as well get 10 and do some
SERDES routing between them! Would be a cheap way to get 850k FPGA LUTs :)

Each board has multiple SERDES.

Good find.


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