Announced the formation of a new non-profit organization Open-Source FPGA Foundation (OSFPGA), aimed at developing, promoting and creating an environment for the joint development of open hardware and software solutions related to the use of FPGA field-programmable gate array (field-programmable gate array) logic circuits that allow logic reprogramming work after chip fabrication. Key binary operations (AND, NAND, OR, NOR and XOR) in such chips are implemented using logic gates (switches) with multiple inputs and one output, the connection configuration between which can be changed programmatically.
OSFPGA's founding members included some prominent FPGA-related technology researchers from companies and projects such as EPFL, QuickLogic, Zero ASIC, and the GSG Group. Under the auspices of the new organization, a set of open and free tools for rapid prototyping based on FPGA chips and support for electronic design automation (EDA) tools will be developed. The organization will also oversee the collaborative development of FPGA-related open standards, providing a neutral platform for companies to share experiences and technologies.
It is expected that through the activities of OSFPGA, chip companies will be able to get rid of some of the engineering processes in the production of FPGAs, end-solution developers will receive a ready-made customizable software stack for FPGAs, and joint work will be established to create new high-quality architectures. It is noted that open tools provided by the OSFPGA will be maintained at the highest level of quality, meeting or exceeding industry standards.
The main goals of the Open-Source FPGA Foundation:
- Providing resources and infrastructure to develop a set of tools related to FPGA hardware and software.
- Promoting the use of these tools through various activities.
- Providing support, development and openness of research tools for advanced FPGA architectures, as well as related software and hardware developments.
- Maintain a catalog of publicly available FPGA architectures, design technologies, and board designs derived from expired publications and patents.
- Prepare and provide access to training materials that help build a community of interested developers.
- Simplify interaction with chip manufacturers to reduce the cost and time to test and validate new FPGA architectures and hardware.
Project related open tools:
- OpenFPGA is an electronic design automation (EDA) suite for FPGAs that supports the generation of stuffing based on descriptions in the Verilog language.
- 1st CLaaS is a framework that allows you to use FPGA to create hardware accelerators for web and cloud applications.
- Verilog-to-Routing (VTR) is a toolkit that allows you to configure the selected FPGA based on the description in the Verilog language.
- Symbiflow is a toolkit for developing solutions based on FPGA Xilinx 7, Lattice iCE40, Lattice ECP5 and QuickLogic EOS S3.
- Yosys is a Verilog RTL synthesis framework for typical applications.
- EPFL is a collection of libraries for developing logic synthesis applications.
- LSOracle is an add-on for EPFL libraries for optimizing the results of logical synthesis.
- Edalize is a Python toolkit for interacting with electronic design automation (EDA) systems and generating project files for them.
- GHDL is a compiler, parser, simulator, and synthesizer for the VHDL hardware description language.
- VerilogCreator is a plugin for QtCreator that turns this application into a Verilog 2005 development environment.
- FuseSoC is a package manager for HDL (Hardware Description Language) code and assembly abstraction utility for FPGA/ASIC.
- SOFA (Skywater Open-source FPGA) is a set of open IP (Intellectual Property) FPGAs created using the Skywater PDK and the OpenFPGA framework.
- openFPGALoader is an FPGA programming utility.
- LiteDRAM is a customizable IP Core for FPGA with DRAM implementation.
Additionally, the Main_MiSTer project can be noted, which allows using the DE10-Nano FPGA board connected to a TV or monitor to simulate the equipment of old game consoles and classic computers. Unlike running emulators, the use of FPGA makes it possible to recreate the original hardware environment on which you can run existing system images and applications for older hardware platforms.
Source: opennet.ru