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FWIW, that Spartan-6 Mimas v2 chip will not use the same toolset as the one on AWS. Spartan-6 FPGAs are older and require the "Xilinx ISE" EDA tools, which are

by aseipp 10y ago

FWIW, that Spartan-6 Mimas v2 chip will not use the same toolset as the one on AWS. Spartan-6 FPGAs are older and require the "Xilinx ISE" EDA tools, which are the older, no-longer-developed tools they created. All modern Xilinx FPGAs are the "-7 series" FPGAs and they use "Xilinx Vivado" for development. This includes the combination ARM + FPGA devices, the 'Zynq series'. This sounds like nitpicking but it's a very important distinction to make, since ISE is no longer maintained and much worse than Vivado (though I never used it much). Plus, although it's not the dominant concern for many people and needs -- 7-series boards are, far and away, much more powerful than the Spartan series. If you wanted to do something like use Linux on an FPGA softcore, that's where you want to be (granted, the Mimas specifically can handle embedded Linux, like the J2 core!) A much better Xilinx board IMO is the Digilent 'Arty', which is an Artix-7 with 4x the amount of SDRAM, 3x the logic and many more peripherals like ethernet. This thing is powerful and will be good for a lot of tasks, and the Vivado license is completely free: http://store.digilentinc.com/arty-artix-7-fpga-development-board-for-makers-and-hobbyists/ http://store.digilentinc.com/arty-artix-7-fpga-development-b...

patrickg_zill 10y ago
That board definitely looks like the better deal; especially since it has on-board 10/100 ethernet, making it much easier to communicate with. Would a small design (or perhaps a design meant to be parallel) be able to be prototyped on the Arty and then re-compiled using the same toolchain for the much-larger FPGAs on the AWS platform?
- aseipp 10y ago
  It is really, really, really going to depend on the design in question. But, in short: probably not. If you are creating some design that is essentially agnostic of the underlying peripherials, just generic, reusable RTL -- for example, perhaps you will write a CPU core, like picorv32, or softusb-navre -- then the same RTL will, in fact, work just fine, just about anywhere. Provided you don't use some vendor/device specific code, naturally. But that isn't normally what you do. A CPU core by itself is worthless unless it's driving some on-board component. The problem is when any actual peripherals are involved. Which is to say, "every realistic design you'd need to put on the F1 instance." Doing things like talking to an ethernet controller or PCIe bus, in practice, is going to vary immensely based on the board, controllers, and design you're implementing, in practice. Furthermore, boards are going to have their own quirks and errata, etc. A lot of the work is spent just on dealing with the hardware. For example, the Arty does not have DDR4, but DDR2, much less ECC RAM. Probably need a different SDRAM controller. No PCIe, so you don't really have an option for a PCIe bridge with the Arty, so it's impossible to even experiment here. There are other things. As an example, FPGAs come with tiny pieces of RAM called "BlockRAMs", which are available to the logic, spread out over the device, independent of any other memory. But, the FPGA in the F1 has an even better component -- UltraRAMs, with more space and "input" ports -- that aren't available on older devices. So you cannot use or test the impact of these components easily. In practice, this is all incredibly important as it will impact the power usage and timing of your design. (BRAMs are a very important resource to utilize effectively.) This isn't to say it's all a waste of time, and you do it over and over. The cost of a port to a new board will definitely be amortized, by having support for an existing board in place, and having a working, tested design. But the F1 is a high-class piece of hardware that would be extremely hard to replicate in practice for anyone working independently. And you have to spend a lot of time with the hardware. So it's going to be difficult to actually make sure everything works coherently without spending a boatload of money. The only device in a similar class I can think of, which is also the most affordable UltraScale+ device I know of that doesn't require $4000 for Vivado, is the new UltraScale+ Zynq SoC available from Avnet. For "only" $700 USD for a SoC + carrier card: http://microzed.org/product/ultrazed-EG http://microzed.org/product/ultrazed-EG An ARM+FPGA device is still a much different beast. But it's a lot closer to what the F1 is, in some senses.
GrumpyYoungMan 10y ago
You mention the Zynq so I'd like to add that I'd add that Digilent seems to have recently released their Zynq-based 'Arty Z7' boards which provide a dual core ARM on the same chip as the FPGA and is also supported by the free Vivado design tools. http://store.digilentinc.com/arty-z7-apsoc-zynq-7000-development-board-for-makers-and-hobbyists/ http://store.digilentinc.com/arty-z7-apsoc-zynq-7000-develop...
- wincy 10y ago
  For a software engineer who has never done anything with FPGAs or embedded devices but is interested in learning, do you know of any good resources?
  - heathjohns 10y ago
    With apologies for plugging my own project: https://www.blinklight.io/ https://www.blinklight.io/ starts right at the ground level.
    - MrBuddyCasino 10y ago
      Thats a pretty nice project you got there. Worth checking out!
- aseipp 10y ago
  I forgot they released the Z7. The main reason I recommended the ordinary Arty is because I have one sitting here :) It's also a bit cheaper, it seems... Digilent will apparently be releasing a Spartan-7 Arty variant soon, too. (No clue what the new Spartans will have to offer...) TBH I'm not sure whether new people should really jump into combo SoCs, since there's a lot more to manage in some sense. OTOH, having an ARM processor at hand makes some interfacing tasks actually practical! As far as combo SoCs go, this one IMO seems to be the best deal, especially as the $200 'Black' board gives you a free SDSoC license and a lot of connectivity: https://www.crowdsupply.com/krtkl/snickerdoodle https://www.crowdsupply.com/krtkl/snickerdoodle No ethernet, but a breakout is coming...

by aseipp 10y ago

patrickg_zill 10y ago

That board definitely looks like the better deal; especially since it has on-board 10/100 ethernet, making it much easier to communicate with. Would a small design (or perhaps a design meant to be parallel) be able to be prototyped on the Arty and then re-compiled using the same toolchain for the much-larger FPGAs on the AWS platform?

aseipp 10y ago
It is really, really, really going to depend on the design in question. But, in short: probably not. If you are creating some design that is essentially agnostic of the underlying peripherials, just generic, reusable RTL -- for example, perhaps you will write a CPU core, like picorv32, or softusb-navre -- then the same RTL will, in fact, work just fine, just about anywhere. Provided you don't use some vendor/device specific code, naturally. But that isn't normally what you do. A CPU core by itself is worthless unless it's driving some on-board component. The problem is when any actual peripherals are involved. Which is to say, "every realistic design you'd need to put on the F1 instance." Doing things like talking to an ethernet controller or PCIe bus, in practice, is going to vary immensely based on the board, controllers, and design you're implementing, in practice. Furthermore, boards are going to have their own quirks and errata, etc. A lot of the work is spent just on dealing with the hardware. For example, the Arty does not have DDR4, but DDR2, much less ECC RAM. Probably need a different SDRAM controller. No PCIe, so you don't really have an option for a PCIe bridge with the Arty, so it's impossible to even experiment here. There are other things. As an example, FPGAs come with tiny pieces of RAM called "BlockRAMs", which are available to the logic, spread out over the device, independent of any other memory. But, the FPGA in the F1 has an even better component -- UltraRAMs, with more space and "input" ports -- that aren't available on older devices. So you cannot use or test the impact of these components easily. In practice, this is all incredibly important as it will impact the power usage and timing of your design. (BRAMs are a very important resource to utilize effectively.) This isn't to say it's all a waste of time, and you do it over and over. The cost of a port to a new board will definitely be amortized, by having support for an existing board in place, and having a working, tested design. But the F1 is a high-class piece of hardware that would be extremely hard to replicate in practice for anyone working independently. And you have to spend a lot of time with the hardware. So it's going to be difficult to actually make sure everything works coherently without spending a boatload of money. The only device in a similar class I can think of, which is also the most affordable UltraScale+ device I know of that doesn't require $4000 for Vivado, is the new UltraScale+ Zynq SoC available from Avnet. For "only" $700 USD for a SoC + carrier card: http://microzed.org/product/ultrazed-EG http://microzed.org/product/ultrazed-EG An ARM+FPGA device is still a much different beast. But it's a lot closer to what the F1 is, in some senses.

GrumpyYoungMan 10y ago

You mention the Zynq so I'd like to add that I'd add that Digilent seems to have recently released their Zynq-based 'Arty Z7' boards which provide a dual core ARM on the same chip as the FPGA and is also supported by the free Vivado design tools. http://store.digilentinc.com/arty-z7-apsoc-zynq-7000-development-board-for-makers-and-hobbyists/ http://store.digilentinc.com/arty-z7-apsoc-zynq-7000-develop...

wincy 10y ago
For a software engineer who has never done anything with FPGAs or embedded devices but is interested in learning, do you know of any good resources?
- heathjohns 10y ago
  With apologies for plugging my own project: https://www.blinklight.io/ https://www.blinklight.io/ starts right at the ground level.
  - MrBuddyCasino 10y ago
    Thats a pretty nice project you got there. Worth checking out!
aseipp 10y ago
I forgot they released the Z7. The main reason I recommended the ordinary Arty is because I have one sitting here :) It's also a bit cheaper, it seems... Digilent will apparently be releasing a Spartan-7 Arty variant soon, too. (No clue what the new Spartans will have to offer...) TBH I'm not sure whether new people should really jump into combo SoCs, since there's a lot more to manage in some sense. OTOH, having an ARM processor at hand makes some interfacing tasks actually practical! As far as combo SoCs go, this one IMO seems to be the best deal, especially as the $200 'Black' board gives you a free SDSoC license and a lot of connectivity: https://www.crowdsupply.com/krtkl/snickerdoodle https://www.crowdsupply.com/krtkl/snickerdoodle No ethernet, but a breakout is coming...