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Part of the appeal of mister is it runs on cheap "dev" FPGA boards that have their price reduced to appeal to students and educators. Those are typically boards

Part of the appeal of mister is it runs on cheap "dev" FPGA boards that have their price reduced to appeal to students and educators. Those are typically boards from Intel and Xilinx. It's been awhile since I looked at open FPGA synth tools, but I remember that Intel support was non-existent and Xilinx support was rudimentary. You couldn't get the same performance and packing as you can with the proprietary tools.

delroth 5y ago
The Xilinx -7 series of FPGA is fairly well supported by SymbiFlow these days. https://symbiflow-examples.readthedocs.io/en/latest/building-examples.html#xilinx-7-series https://symbiflow-examples.readthedocs.io/en/latest/building...
- ivegotnoaccount 5y ago
  Unless it changed recently, I think it doesn't have full support for BRAM, and no support for BSP and hard blocks, right ? I wouldn't be surprised if some were used in the Mister project. (Doesn't change the fact that Stmbiflow is an impressive feat)
  - snvzz 5y ago
    I don't know the state of Xilinx family 7 open source support, other than there has been work on it for years. A competitive chip that is well supported (including BRAM etc) is the Lattice ECP5, as found in e.g. the ULX3S dev board.
snvzz 5y ago
>price reduced, cheap, etc Note that the chip used in that board is listed in retailers such as digikey. It's not so expensive as to prevent third party boards. It would even be well feasible to use a larger FPGA or a higher speed grade. FPGA chips used in devboards are typically the lowest grade.