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The $75 price point is okay. Not sure what this is trying to be other than an eval board for 'also rans' in the FPGA and Cortex-M space. One of the reasons I l
by ChuckMcM 7y ago
The $75 price point is okay.
Not sure what this is trying to be other than an eval board for 'also rans' in the FPGA and Cortex-M space. One of the reasons I like the Lattice FPGA boards like the Icebreaker[1] is that there is a complete open source tool chain for them. Seems like adding a processor to something like that might be an interesting place.
[1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/1bitsquared/icebreaker-fpga https://www.crowdsupply.com/1bitsquared/icebreaker-fpga
- inamberclad 7y agoIf you are alright with a softcore, I think a picorv32 will fit on the ice40.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoCyclone outclasses any ICE40 out there. If you need the logic capacity or peripherals your options become constrained. The sad thing is that we had cheap Spartan-3's and Spartan-6's with impressive resources but the vendors didn't want to keep making devices with that sort of bang for the buck.
- TD-Linux 7y agoThe open tools also work on ECP5, which goes quite a bit bigger than the Cyclone 10 chip on the Arduino and is also pretty cost effective. In fact it's big enough that you can usually dispense with the separate microcontroller - I built a ulx3s which can boot Linux on the ECP5-85.
- analognoise 7y agoYou can still buy Spartan 3 and 6 devices - last I checked they're even still being manufactured.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoThe tooling is not supported with bug fixes.
- robert_foss 7y agoAnother strike for Xilinx tooling then. Open source tooling can't come soon enough.
- analognoise 7y agoXilinx gives away access to a multi-language license for Vivado, fully capable for all chips under hundreds of dollars, with a built in simulator (again, mixed language!) used by tens of thousands of actual hardware engineers around the world successfully, but they're the bad guys? And their "unsupported" tool is also used successfully today by rafts of actual hardware engineers, and it's still better than the free alternatives by leaps and bounds. There are no plucky garage shops or "wise crowds" making FPGA tools that are even in the same galaxy as ISE or Vivado.
- ZirconiumX 7y ago> There are no plucky garage shops or "wise crowds" making FPGA tools that are even in the same galaxy as ISE or Vivado. Symbiotic EDA comes to mind. However, I would argue they don't need to be great, just good. I don't have a copy of Vivado to hand (I have an Altera dev board instead), but I can take PicoSoC with Yosys/nextpnr and have a bitstream in about a minute. If I try the same task in Quartus, that takes about five minutes. Producing a (relatively) inefficient bitstream actually speeds up the compile/run cycle in that scenario. If the design meets timing, which is often decided by external factors, any extra time spend trying to make the design "better" is wasted time.
- lnsru 7y agoSame open source discussion again. I’ll try to explain short why it will never happen. Since FPGAs have applications outside hobbyist domain, things are getting complicated. There are lawyers involved, support contracts signed and vendors are liable for their silicon. Now imagine some open source toolchain is used and some problems occur. Who’s liable? No single vendor will invest a penny into something maintained by somebody else. No single manager on this world will allow me to use 3rd party tools without vendor’s support for €1M FPGA design. There is no business case for silicon vendor to open source anything. Maybe brave hackers will reverse engineer bitstream generation, but this knowledge will be used only among hackers and their friends. Personally I don’t see any advantage using these tools and writing this in my resume, because nobody will use them in industry anyway.