Timothy Ansell - Xilinx Series 7 FPGAs Now Have a Fully Open Source Toolchain!

You should be super excited about FPGAs and how they allow open source projects to do hardware development. In this talk I will cover a basic introduction into what an FPGA is and can do, what an FPGA toolchain is, and how much things sucked when the only option was to use proprietary toolchains. The SymbiFlow project changed this and I’ll discuss what is currently supported including a demo of Linux on a RISC-V core with a cheap Xilinx FPGA development board.
Slides for this talk:
j.mp/had19-sym...
Read the article on Hackaday:
hackaday.com/?...
Learn more about Symbiflow:
symbiflow.gith...
Follow Tim on Twitter:
/ mithro

[@byronwatkins2565]

Someone, who is active in developing open source FPGA tools, should approach the smaller chip manufacturers and suggest that they simply make chips and work with tool developers to generate suitable hardware definition files. Chip manufacturers could mark up their chips comfortably and sell them with a list of urls to suitable support software. I am certainly willing to pay more for chips whose internals are fully disclosed than I would pay otherwise. They could offer a line with OpenRISC ASIC onboard. They could offer a line with encryption/decryption engines plus 1024-4096 bits of key PROM to accept an encrypted bit-string that protects clients' IP and that are tailored toward secure communications. Since each client can program his own decryption key, this is secure against the chip manufacturer as well as other snoopers. They could then patent these improvements and require that the larger companies pay license fees.

[@HerrHeisenheim]

Great talk. Too bad some slides were not shown properly. I look forward to see what this project will bring to the community, thanks for sharing.

[@ArranShort]

Great talk, and seems a genuine chap and the offer of free hardware is awesome. I've got a few projects that an open fgpa platform would be perfect to use.

[@VigneshBalasubramaniam]

And now AMD has bought Xilinx.

[@v4lgrind]

The title lied to me! But other than that; neat.

[@JiaoXianjun]

Now AMD is kind of intel in the FPGA world!

[@codesofcolours2245]

What about OpenCL in the FPGA world? I was expecting him to touch it as a software guy. Is it only Intel that is moving ahead on this end?

[@kramer3d]

yep

[@charles-pl7zl]

Lattice had like a 7-10% of that market share....

[@cls9474]

What happens if Xilinx starts to encrypt their bistreams?

[@dariuslukas1560]

I don't think that's too much of a concern. The bit stream is the information encoding the layout of the FPGA which is sent to the FPGA. There isn't much room for hardware to encrypt/decrypt the data stream, unless they embedded it into the FPGA itself. Furthermore, why would they? I would think it's in Xilinx's best interest to have their devices supported by as many toolchains as possible.

[@davidclift5989]

Xilinx is in the business of selling silicon, the provide tools which is just a means to sell more silicon. I very much doubt they would want to stop people using their silicon. The problem I see is if your opensource FPGA placement tool makes a mistake ow do you even find it?

[@0LoneTech]

They already have encryption blocks, for those clients who don't want their FPGA based devices cloned.
There also is an issue where FPGA vendors have paid tiers of their software tools. Since you have to pay for software to support some of their devices, they have an incentive to make it harder to support those.
That said, Xilinx have supported other tools to generate bitstreams in the past, e.g. via Xilinx-Lava (which allowed *much* faster builds, both in P&R and clocks). AMD also haven't been very hostile to my knowledge.
It would be a nicer world if we could just cooperate.

[@Tapajara]

I want Symbiflow for Windows. Not so much for Linux.

[@wolframio8355]

Yosys and nextpnr already run on windows

[@teejay872]

@@wolframio8355 icestorm too..

[@latestunique3409]

@@wolframio8355 Hye how are you? Can you please tell me what is open source FPGA?

[@marcbotnope1728]

To bad the using verilog when VHDL is superior in every way.

[@rjordans]

You can use VHDL through the GHDL plugin for Yosys, that's starting to work quite nicely!

[@alexcipriani6003]

I have learned VHDL in school, when I tried applying for jobs everyone in industry except aerospace and gov used verilog.

[@MichaelFJ1969]

@@alexcipriani6003 It's a regional thing. In Europe VHDL is more popular than verilog.

[@Dixitkushagra175]

@@alexcipriani6003 Same, I have only seen it in the Aerospace and defence sector.

[@alexcipriani6003]

@@MichaelFJ1969 I am talking about US mostly defense companies and gov use it...majority of private companies use verilog.