iCE40

23 Articles

An Open Source Toolchain For ICE40 FPGAs

May 29, 2015 by 65 Comments

FPGAs are great, but open source they are not. All the players in FPGA land have their own proprietary tools for creating bitstream files, and synthesizing the HDL of your choice for any FPGA usually means agreeing to terms and conditions that nobody reads.

After months of work, and based on the previous work of [Clifford Wolf] and [Mathias Lasser], [Cotton Seed] has released a fully open source Verilog to bitstream development tool chain for the Lattice iCE40LP with support for more devices in the works.

Last March, we saw the reverse engineering of the Lattice ICE40 bitstream, but this is a far cry from a robust, mature development platform. Along with Yosys, also written by [Clifford Wolf] it’s relatively simple to go from Verilog to an FPGA that runs your own code.

Video demo below, and there’s a ton of documentation over on the Project IceStorm project page. You can pick up the relevant dev board for about $22 as well.

Continue reading “An Open Source Toolchain For ICE40 FPGAs” →

Reverse Engineering Lattice’s ICE40 FPGA Bitstream

March 29, 2015 by 19 Comments

Unlike microcontroller projects, projects involving FPGAs cannot yet claim to rely on a mature open-source toolchain. Each FPGA will, at some point, need to be configured with a proprietary bitstream produced from a closed source synthesis tool. This lack of a full FPGA toolchain to take your project from Verilog-or-VHDL to an uploadable bitstream is due to many reasons. First, writing such a “compiler” is complicated. It involves intimate knowledge of the resources available on the FPGA that can assimilate the functionality of the intended design. Second, the entire synthesis procedure is closed-source, a “secret sauce” of sorts for each FPGA vendor.

In response, [Alex] and [Clifford] have taken the first step towards an open-source toolchain for one FPGA; they’ve reverse-engineered the bitstream of Latttice Semiconductor’s iCE40 FPGA. The duo didn’t just pick the iCE40 on a whim. This choice was deliberately because that FPGA is available on a development board for a mere $22 so that others could follow in their footsteps without breaking the bank.

In the video below, [Clifford] demos the functionality of this new tool by synthesizing a design from Verilog to a bitstream and then back from a bitstream to Verilog. Given this feature, a staggering amount of work has been done towards developing a polished open-source toolchain for this particular FGPA.

To snag a copy of the latest code, have a look at its documentation page.

Continue reading “Reverse Engineering Lattice’s ICE40 FPGA Bitstream” →