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NiteFury – An Artix-7 FPGA with its own DDR3 RAM right in your laptop
- rwmj 4y agoDoes yosys support this? I truly hate Vivado with a passion.
- mithro 4y agoThe open source toolchain doesn't quite support the PCIe interface yet but all the other stuff should work in theory. The best place to see what works is the F4PGA examples documentation at <https://f4pga-examples.readthedocs.io/en/latest/building-examples.html https://f4pga-examples.readthedocs.io/en/latest/building-exa...>. If you want to start with fully open source tools on a Xilinx 7 series FPGA the best option is the Digilent Arty A35T board <https://digilent.com/shop/arty-a7-artix-7-fpga-development-board/ https://digilent.com/shop/arty-a7-artix-7-fpga-development-b...>.
- Teknoman117 4y agoI'm also a fan of the Alchitry Au and Au+ boards as well - https://www.sparkfun.com/products/16527 https://www.sparkfun.com/products/16527 They have a lot more IO available, but they're also out of stock until the chip shortage problems improve...
- pella 4y agoAlternative: Aller Artix-7 FPGA Board with M.2 Interface $518.99 https://numato.com/product/aller-artix-7-fpga-board-with-m-2-interface/ https://numato.com/product/aller-artix-7-fpga-board-with-m-2... - Xilinx Artix 7 FPGA (XC7A200T-2FBG484I) - 2Gb DDR3 ( MT41J128M16JT-125:K TR ) - 4 lane PCIe Gen2 (5 GT/s) - Trusted Platform Module (AT97SC3205) - M.2 Connector Interface, M-Key - Flash memory: 512 Mb Quadbit SPI flash memory (S25FL512SDSBHV210/IS25LP512M-RHLE) - 1 RGB LED for custom use
- anewpersonality 4y agoCould I implement a RISC-V SoC comparable to a RPi4 with this?
- zen_1 4y agoI think with FPGAs in general you'd have trouble getting to RPi4 frequencies (700MHz stock, with boosts on top of that), and I doubt you'd have enough resources (LUTs etc...) to implement all the features you'd find in a fully featured ARMv8 CPU (with 4 exception levels, a complex MMU and just an insane amount of configurable behavior in general). I mean, hell, the TRM (https://developer.arm.com/documentation/ddi0487/latest https://developer.arm.com/documentation/ddi0487/latest) for the CPU in a RPI4 is over 11k pages long. I don't think that's something you could reasonably expect to reimplement on your own. There'd be nothing stopping you from implementing a simpler/reduced RISC-V processor though, with only the ISA extensions you want (or none at all).
- al2o3cr 4y agoIf you're looking for "fast CPU cores plus custom peripherals", something like the Zynq series might be a better choice; they have the same style of FPGA fabric as this board, along with dedicated ARM processor cores. For instance, you could start with this development board: http://www.myirtech.com/list.asp?id=502 http://www.myirtech.com/list.asp?id=502
- anfilt 4y agoYes you kinda can with an FPGA, but you gonna generally be limited to how fast you can clock. The RPi4 clocks at like 1.5 Ghz with 4 cores, and if you want 4 fast cores that will eat up a lot area. A pretty fast softcore is gonna be like 500Mhz, some really optimized designs might hit close to 700Mhz on better FPGAs. Although when working with softcores you can a lot times get away with lower clocks since anything that would require a lot of cycles if written in software can a lot times be made as a block on the FPGA that your softcore just manages. Assuming your FPGA has enough area. Freeing up the softcore to do other things.
- 4y ago
- paulmd 4y agoSo I was recently thinking of playing around with an FPGA for shits and grins. Try out embedded console emulation and try some basic development stuff and so on. I'm not super terribly concerned about maximum efficiency/recent node, but a decent number of logic cells would be preferable and ideally a decent output (DP 1.2 or HDMI 2.0), and ethernet might be a plus (but that one is negotiable). Does anyone have any recommendations for a decent dev board? Used/ebay is fine, would like to keep it to maybe a couple hundred bucks, or at least like, under $500. My understanding is all FPGA toolchains are a nightmare, and I'm guessing I may have to pirate the software, no chance of me affording a $10k-a-seat license for a toy that probably won't go any farther than a couple nights of tinkering.
- gadiyar 4y agoI have a couple of the ULX3S boards with a Lattice ECP5 FPGA and would highly recommend them. They also support a fully open source tool chain and have a great community. https://www.crowdsupply.com/radiona/ulx3s https://www.crowdsupply.com/radiona/ulx3s
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoThe Xilinx webpack is free for hobbyist level devices. You can implement a lot before you hit its resource limits. Also, in the past (don't know about now) you could get a version of Modelsim with the Altera Quartus toolchain. It could be used with Xilinx simulation libraries as well, although that technically is a license violation.
- willis936 4y agoIf you've been tinkering with console emulation then you may have heard of MiSTer, which runs on a DE10-Nano (Intel Cyclone V-based board by TerasIC). It has 110K LEs and costs $225. Resellers are out of stock but I bought two directly from terasIC last month and they shipped within a week.
- hakfoo 4y agoI feel like there's probably some market for something even smaller than today's FPGAs. I'm picturing situations where you might use a handful of 74xx components to perform a task, but start getting bogged down by factors like "I can't fit 15 chips on my breadboard and even if I did, I'd probably mess up the wiring accidentally". A full "software at runtime" microcontroller solution introduces its own nuances (having to load and initialize, potential timing factors), even if the price is right. A still-in-production commercial-grade FPGA means replacing $10 of parts with $100, so it's not really hobbyist-friendly, and may be wildly overkill for the task. I guess maybe the PAL/GAL ecosystem is sort of what I'm envisioning, but it seems like a dead-end of obscure tools and parts labelled "not suggested for new designs". Or maybe there's a yet-to-be-tapped market for a small-scale hobbyist FPGA that's priced accordingly.
- _x5tx 4y agoI wonder if it would be possible to run MiSTer emulators on it.
- duskwuff 4y agoIn principle, yes, but connecting a display or a controller to the FPGA would be difficult.
- kragen 4y agoIf it's on a PCIe card, maybe you can plug it into a motherboard that has USB and HDMI output?
- wtallis 4y agoThe PCIe link definitely has plenty of bandwidth to stream uncompressed video to the host system—and if that host supports P2P DMA, it's probably even possible to push straight to VRAM without a round-trip through the host CPU's RAM. If there's enough room left on the FPGA, it could implement upscaling and CRT-emulating filters to provide a 4k stream to the host. The downside is that you'd need custom drivers and software on the host system to redirect input events to the FPGA and handle the video feed it produces.
- Teknoman117 4y agoThere's also a small amount of IO pins on a high density header. I built an adapter that converts the LVDS voltage levels to TMDS so you can use it with HDMI or DVI - https://github.com/teknoman117/ACORN-CLE-DVI https://github.com/teknoman117/ACORN-CLE-DVI Side note - this is the smallest pitch component I've ever soldered. Used a stencil and a hotplate since these are 0.4mm QFNs. Edit - I really need to update the pictures. I forgot to twist the differential pairs before taking them.
- gchadwick 4y agoIt would be a significant amount of work. The MiSTer project is specifically targeted at the DE10-Nano so it's designed for that FPGA and that peripheral set. In particular MiSTer relies on the onboard arm to run support software, you'd need to replace that on this (perhaps with a RISC-V softcore you could build the MiSTer software for but lots of software work to do to make that work). It may also simply not be possible. The DE10-Nano has DDR memory for example but most MiSTer cores need extra add-on SDRAM. The reason being the latency on the DDR is just too high for the accurate emulate most cores are aiming for. So SDRAM is required. On this board you don't have that option. Though perhaps you can build your own DDR controller, with the DE10-Nano you have to use the hard controller built into the FPGA. Perhaps another controller specifically optimised for the latency needs of MiSTer cores could work. Each core would need potentially significant porting work to use this new setup as they get direct access to the SDRAM pins in MiSTer. You'd need to trace back to where they're actually generating memory accesses and then plug that into whatever new DDR controller you had.
- transpute 4y agoCrypto-surplus hardware with same FPGA, https://www.hivelist.org/@apshamilton/acorn-215-xilinx-artix-7-200t-fpga-with-1gb-dram-usdus70-with-payment-in-crypto https://www.hivelist.org/@apshamilton/acorn-215-xilinx-artix... & https://www.eevblog.com/forum/fpga/sqrl-acorn-as-an-interesting-artix-7-board/ https://www.eevblog.com/forum/fpga/sqrl-acorn-as-an-interest... Artix-7 is supported by LiteX, an open-source toolchain based on reverse engineering of Xilinx bitstream, https://github.com/enjoy-digital/litex https://github.com/enjoy-digital/litex & https://antmicro.com/blog/2020/05/multicore-vex-in-litex/ https://antmicro.com/blog/2020/05/multicore-vex-in-litex/ These can be used for PCILeech DMA attacks/testing, http://blog.frizk.net/2021/10/acorn.html http://blog.frizk.net/2021/10/acorn.html
- arcticbull 4y agoYou can also grab an Arty from Digilent. [1] [1] https://digilent.com/shop/arty-a7-artix-7-fpga-development-board/ https://digilent.com/shop/arty-a7-artix-7-fpga-development-b...
- Teknoman117 4y agoA bit of a nitpick - LiteX still mostly needs Vivado installed for now for 7 series FPGAs. There's a project that's very far along in reverse engineering the Xilinx bitstream (https://github.com/f4pga/prjxray https://github.com/f4pga/prjxray), but it's still missing many features (PCIe, SERDES, hardware multipliers, etc.). You can run on the open source toolchain but you lose so many of the reasons to actually use a Xilinx FPGA. The only fully supported reverse engineered FPGAs at the moment are the Lattice ECP5(-5G), iCE40, and QuickLogic EOS families. https://f4pga.readthedocs.io/en/latest/status.html https://f4pga.readthedocs.io/en/latest/status.html
- mithro 4y agoWhen did you last check? The Yosys+VPR toolchain currently supports a full Linux capable SoC with Ethernet and DDR memory on the Arty A35T (which has a Xilinx Artix 7 part), see the example at https://f4pga-examples.readthedocs.io/en/latest/building-examples.html#linux-litex-demo https://f4pga-examples.readthedocs.io/en/latest/building-exa...
- Teknoman117 4y agoPlease note these are unavailable for awhile. I actually tried ordering one of these ~18 months ago but the developer says he can't source the large FPGAs due to component shortages. I ended up settling for the reduced version (XC7A100T versus XC7A200T) called LiteFury which was still available at the time. The Acorn CLE-215 is equivalent to the NiteFury (XC7A200T-2) if you can get your hands on one, and the CLE-215+ is the same size but a higher speed grade (XC7A200T-3). You can officially do DDR3-1066 on the plus model and DDR3-800 on the non-plus model. The developers website is here: https://rhsresearch.com/ https://rhsresearch.com/
- Heleana 4y agoThere would be a lot of work to do. The MiSTer project is made for the DE10-Nano, so it is made to work with that FPGA and that set of peripherals. MiSTer, in particular, needs the onboard arm to run support software, so you would have to replace that on this (perhaps with a RISC-V softcore you could build the MiSTer software for but lots of software work to do to make that work).
- tomaskafka 4y agoXcode un-xip accelerator? :)
- capableweb 4y agoCorrect me if i'm wrong, but these could be used for hash cracking as well right? With something like hashcat, which I think supports some FPGA boards. Maybe not the most memory intensive hash algorithms, but the rest should be relatively efficient to crack on something like this.
- tyingq 4y agoJohn the ripper was able to get some good results with a different FPGA: "Added FPGA support for 7 hash types for ZTEX 1.15y boards...Specifically, we support: bcrypt, descrypt (including its bigcrypt extension), sha512crypt & Drupal7, sha256crypt, md5crypt (including its Apache apr1 and AIX smd5 variations) & phpass. As far as we're aware, several of these are implemented on FPGAvfor the very first time. For bcrypt, our ~119k c/s at cost 5 in ~27W greatly outperforms latest high-end GPUs per board, per dollar, and per Watt." https://www.openwall.com/lists/announce/2019/05/14/1 https://www.openwall.com/lists/announce/2019/05/14/1
- acd 4y agoCan one do software defined radio with pci express fpga or do the fpga need to be on the same pcb as the sdr radio board?
- lnsru 4y agoNot enough information. But there are RF board to board connectors, so FPGA can be everywhere.
- greggsy 4y agoYou could presumably do anything if you’re clever enough with the right FPGA: https://www.mathworks.com/help/supportpkg/xilinxzynqbasedradio/ug/zynq-sdr-hardware-architecture.html https://www.mathworks.com/help/supportpkg/xilinxzynqbasedrad...
- daniel-cussen 4y agoI could make cryptographic oaths with this on my laptop!