Open Source tools for FPGA Development

This post comments on the rise in popularity of FPGAs in the hobbyist & maker communities - thanks to some open source tool chains.

For many years, the FPGA silicon vendors, Altera, Xilinx and Lattice have made sure that their FPGA tool chains were anything but open - remaining either chargeable, licence locked and always proprietary. This strategy has rather restricted the uptake of FPGAs within the hobbyist community - where budgets are tight.

The situation improved a few years ago, when all of the major vendors released free to use tools, for example the Xilinx WebPack, which allows design, compilation, and programming of at least some of the low-end ranges of devices, leaving the premium ranges still chargeable.

However the bottom line still remained - that if you wanted to get into FPGAs, the tools are restricted and an entry level FPGA development board would cost around $100.

Fortunately, due to the work of several dedicated individuals, the previously impenetrable fortress, that was FPGA development has now been breached by the open source community. Moreover, as FPGA devices represent the embodied interface between software and programmable hardware, it has brought together both the open source software and open source hardware communities.

The Breakthrough

The FPGA marketplace is dominated by two rival companies, Altera and Xilinx, both of whom hold close to 45% of the world sales, and whose primary business is to sell high end FPGAs and licenced toolchains.  Lattice Semiconductor, on the other hand, who are are the 3rd minority party, appear to be focusing on low cost, low power FPGAs aimed at portable, mobile and battery powered applications.

Lattice's sales strategy is reflected in their development board offerings - starting at about $20 with the ICE40HX1K "IceStick" .  This is an entry level dev-board in the form of a USB stick which has some LED indicators and a few GPIO pins broken out to a PMOD connector and a pair of headers. In addition to the ICE40HX1K FPGA, there is the familiar FTDI 2232H dual channel USB-serial interface IC, which provides the programming and debug interface to a PC, plus a serial communications port.

The breakthrough to increasing the availability of FPGAs to the hobbyist community came as a result of lower cost entry level hardware platforms, plus the reverse engineering of the Lattice serial bitstream format, which is used to program the FPGA device.

This was achieved by a small group of dedicated open hardware enthusiasts in Project Ice Storm - headed by Clifford Wolf.

In this recent video from the 2015 CCC,  Clifford Wolf explains the Ice Storm tool chain.

Ice Storm is just one module within a tool suite consisting of the following modules

YoSys - Verilog Open Synthesis toolsuite
Arachne-pnr    - Place and Route
Ice Storm
IcoBoard   - a low cost ICE408K dev board - in Raspberry Pi-HAT format.

YoSYS  -->  Aranchne-pnr --> IceStorm --> IceProg

In a nutshell, Ice Storm allows some Lattice FPGAs now to be programmed using an entirely open source tool chain, running under Linux, and hosted on a low cost platform -  for example a Raspberry Pi.

The arrival of IceStorm has heralded a new wave of low cost FPGA boards - based on the Ice40 series - here's the latest round-up:

IcoBoard

NandLand Go Board 

Cat Board

These are likely to be the first of many similar boards - now that toolchains have been reverse-engineered and oped sourced.