3 ms·

This is missing boards with Lattice ECP5 FPGAs, which are a nice alternative to the iCE40 FPGAs and are also supported by the open source tools, but also offer

This is missing boards with Lattice ECP5 FPGAs, which are a nice alternative to the iCE40 FPGAs and are also supported by the open source tools, but also offer more logic, memory, and IO. I only know of the evaluation board from Lattice [0] and the OrangeCrab board [1], but there are probably more. [0]: https://www.latticesemi.com/products/developmentboardsandkits/ecp5evaluationboard https://www.latticesemi.com/products/developmentboardsandkit... [1]: https://orangecrab-fpga.github.io/orangecrab-hardware/ https://orangecrab-fpga.github.io/orangecrab-hardware/

fargle 3y ago
i can vouch for the orangecrab. if you want an ECP5-based FPGA board, it's great.
MegaDeKay 3y ago
There are more! The ULX3S [0] offers the ECP5 in three different sizes in up to 84K LUTs, plus it has an onboard ESP32. Fully open source with plenty of projects and examples built around it [1]. [0] https://www.crowdsupply.com/radiona/ulx3s https://www.crowdsupply.com/radiona/ulx3s [1] https://ulx3s.github.io/ https://ulx3s.github.io/
yummypaint 3y ago
I am a fan of these boards, i believe the economy of scale is propped up by the LED billboard industry
StillBored 3y ago
I was going to point this out too, but I'm frankly not sure how well the opensource toolchains actually work on these chips. I spent a number of hours a year or two back trying to figure out how to talk to the high speed serdes, and failed miserably. But for the kinds of use cases one gets out of an ICE40, it seems the ECP5 devices are going to be pretty solid choices with the open source tool chains. Ex, lots more LUTs talking to slow devices/GPIO pins.
- HansHamster 3y ago
  It seems to work well as far as I can tell, but my ECP5 unfortunately does not have the serdes. I wanted to stick to the 256 caBGA package to keep the board simple, but there is no variant with serdes... The PLLs, block ram, and other IO work fine (have not tried the DDR and gearbox blocks yet).

fargle 3y ago

i can vouch for the orangecrab. if you want an ECP5-based FPGA board, it's great.

MegaDeKay 3y ago

There are more! The ULX3S [0] offers the ECP5 in three different sizes in up to 84K LUTs, plus it has an onboard ESP32. Fully open source with plenty of projects and examples built around it [1]. [0] https://www.crowdsupply.com/radiona/ulx3s https://www.crowdsupply.com/radiona/ulx3s [1] https://ulx3s.github.io/ https://ulx3s.github.io/

yummypaint 3y ago

I am a fan of these boards, i believe the economy of scale is propped up by the LED billboard industry

StillBored 3y ago

I was going to point this out too, but I'm frankly not sure how well the opensource toolchains actually work on these chips. I spent a number of hours a year or two back trying to figure out how to talk to the high speed serdes, and failed miserably. But for the kinds of use cases one gets out of an ICE40, it seems the ECP5 devices are going to be pretty solid choices with the open source tool chains. Ex, lots more LUTs talking to slow devices/GPIO pins.

HansHamster 3y ago
It seems to work well as far as I can tell, but my ECP5 unfortunately does not have the serdes. I wanted to stick to the 256 caBGA package to keep the board simple, but there is no variant with serdes... The PLLs, block ram, and other IO work fine (have not tried the DDR and gearbox blocks yet).