In addition to the work around the FPGA Interchange Format, several CHIPS Alliance members have collaborated on the FPGA tool perf framework. This open FPGA tooling project provides a comprehensive end-to-end FPGA synthesis flow and FPGA performance profiling framework, allowing developers to analyze FPGA designs by looking at metrics such as clock frequency, resource utilization and runtime.
About the CHIPS AllianceThe CHIPS Alliance is an organization which develops and hosts high-quality, open source hardware code (IP cores), interconnect IP (physical and logical protocols), and open source software development tools for design, verification, and more. The primary focus is to provide a barrier-free collaborative environment, to lower the cost of developing IP and tools for hardware development. The CHIPS Alliance is hosted by the Linux Foundation. For more information, visit chipsalliance.org.
Symbiflow Open Source FPGA Toolchain
As a long-time Platinum member of the CHIPS Alliance, Antmicro takes an active part in developing and supporting an open source and collaborative approach to all aspects of hardware design. In this spirit, in a joint effort with Google, AMD Xilinx, University of Toronto and others, a few months back we introduced the FOSS Flow For FPGA (F4PGA) Workgroup, whose aim is to drive open source tooling, IP and research efforts for FPGAs. F4PGA, previously known as SymbiFlow, serves as an umbrella project for several activities, all of which lead to the end goal of a complete FOSS FPGA toolchain.
Another potential improvement involves a Chisel module that could generate Verilog out of Scala sources, seamlessly integrating them into the flow, allowing Chisel code to live next to Verilog; or a module that can use Vivado to generate bitstreams. Additionally, once fpga-interchange becomes a suitable replacement for the current flows, creating an fpga-interchange flow definition will become the next natural step.
All the efforts described above, both current and future, will lead to broader accessibility and maturity of the F4PGA toolchain. Antmicro offers advanced engineering services, helping our customers not only adopt this flow, but also create portable FPGA systems that leverage such open source tools.
As a professional software developer focusing on open source, I have beenspoiled with good and widely supported open source toolchains like GCC for allC and C++ development etc. Why would I expect any different from the FPGAworld?
As you may notice there are many parts and ways to combine these in theSymbiflow toolchain. For some it may still make sense to use some of the closedsource parts of the toolchain because it may result in a higher qualitybitstream that is able to run stable at higher frequencies or less power.However, that being said, with the kind of support Symbiflow is gaining and thegrowing interest from research institutions, I expect the quality of the opensource parts will grow to surpass that of the closed source ones.
The core nMigen project provides an open-source toolchain for developing hardware based on synchronous digital logic using the Python programming language. It aims to be easy to learn and use, reduce or eliminate common coding mistakes, and simplify the design of complex hardware with reusable components.
QuickLogic is a fabless semiconductor company that develops low power, multi-core MCU, FPGAs and embedded FPGA Intellectual Property (IP), voice and sensor processing. The Analytics Toolkit from our subsidiary, SensiML Corporation, completes the end-to-end solution by using AI technology to provide an end-to-end development platform spanning data collection, labeling, algorithm and firmware auto generation, and testing. The full range of solutions is underpinned by open source hardware and software tools to enable the practical and efficient adoption of AI, voice and sensor processing across mobile, wearable, hearable, consumer, industrial, edge and endpoint IoT.
As mentioned in the introduction, even the FPGA design tools used with Qomu are open-source, including SymbiFlow tools for synthesis, place and route, and bitstream generation, as well as nMigen support for a Python-to-FPGA design, and full device emulation with Renode.
SAN JOSE, Calif., June 16, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- QuickLogic Corporation (NASDAQ: QUIK), a developer of ultra-low power multi-core voice-enabled SoCs, embedded FPGA IP, and Endpoint AI solutions, today announced its groundbreaking QORC (QuickLogic Open Reconfigurable Computing) initiative, making it the first programmable logic vendor to actively embrace a fully open source suite of development tools for its FPGA devices and eFPGA technology. This initiative engenders the emerging trend toward open source tooling, significantly broadens access to the company's products, and enables both hardware and software developers with tools supported by both the user community and QuickLogic.
The company's initial open source development tools, developed by Antmicro in collaboration with QuickLogic and Google, include complete support for its EOS S3 low power voice and sensor processing MCU with embedded FPGA, and its PolarPro 3E discrete FPGA family. Support for additional QuickLogic products, including QuickAI and support for its eFPGA IP offering will be added over the next few months.
Traditionally, programmable logic vendors offered and supported only proprietary synthesis, place and route tools. Open source tools were relegated to hobbyists, academics, and independent consultants. However, the electronics industry is starting to see a shift toward open sourced hardware and software as it provides flexibility, vendor and community support, longevity, and adaptability to each engineer's design flow. Google and Antmicro have been noteworthy influencers in this market, increasing the breadth of supported architectures and quality of results for the open source tools. They are now not only viable but desirable for the majority of the development community, including design teams at many of the industry's largest companies.
"QORC is QuickLogic's initiative to embrace the rapidly growing open source FPGA tooling ecosystem, inspiring engineers to collaborate on the creation of exciting and innovative products," said Brian Faith, QuickLogic's president and CEO. "We believe that the wide adoption of open source tools represents a paradigm shift for the industry, and we're proud to be at the leading edge."
This project uses containers to build Symbiflow automatically whenever achange is pushed to Quicklogic/quicklogic-fpga-toolchain. With eachsuccessful build, a container image is pushed as a github package, andmay be pulled or run directly by a container runtime such as Docker.Such images are useful for developing continuous integration of FPGAprojects. The act of building and testing them automatically throughgithub actions also provides assurances that what is checked into thegithub source repositories can be built and executed. Below are some ofthe options for using containers to run or build SymbiFlow forQuicklogic development.
Optimized for the QuickLogic open reconfigurable computing (QORC) initiative, the kit is supported by a wide variety of vendor-supported open source development tools, including Zephyr, FreeRTOS, SymbiFlow and Renode, which broadens access and enables designers to develop applications virtually anywhere.
For those who are not familiar, there is an open-source project called SymbiFlow that provides all the tools for synthesizing Verilog files into bitstream that can be flashed into some FPGAs. This is possible thanks to the reverse engineering that the people involved has done for some Lattice and Xilinx part numbers.
A good friend of mine sent me an article yesterday (Produce your own physical chips for free, in the open) that announced a collaboration between Google, Skywater Technology Foundry and FOSSi (Free and open source silicon) Foundation that ultimately supplies a completely open source set of tools to create ASICs at 130nm node ASIC level. The last piece of this toolkit was an open source PDK (Process Design Kit) data that was produced by Google-Skywater technologies and their offer for free fab services to manufacture chips that were designed with the tool set.
But historically, hardware innovation has been hard to do, took a long time, and costs a lot vs. software innovation with commodity hardware, which by definition, is easier to do, takes almost no time (with continuous innovation even less) and costs almost nothing, especially when using open source.
EDA Tools are also available in open source. The most recent incarnation would be the DARPA funded, OpenROAD project. OpenROAD will ultimately provide a completely open source EDA Tool set for electronic design. The first component of this is a set of EDA tools that convert RTL to GDS II (industry standard graphical design stream description of a IC chip componentry and layout). GDS II streams are used to create masks for IC fabrication.
The Google-Skywater Technologies open source PDK is Apache 2.0 Licensed. The PDK is used in the SKY130 process node, which includes 130nm technologies, high voltage support, 5 metal layers and one interconnect layer. 2ff7e9595c
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