icestick

6 Articles

Icestorm Tools Roundup: Open Source FPGA Dev Guide

October 3, 2018 by 7 Comments

We like the ICE40 FPGA from Lattice for two reasons: there are cheap development boards like the Icestick available for it and there are open source tools. We’ve based several tutorials on the Icestorm toolchain and it works quite well. However, the open source tools don’t always expose everything that you see from commercial tools. You sometimes have to dig a little to find the right tool or option.

Sometimes that’s a good thing. I don’t need to learn yet another fancy IDE and we have plenty of good simulation tools, so why reinvent the wheel? However, if you are only using the basic workflow of Yosys, Arachne-pnr, icepack, and iceprog, you could be missing out on some of the most interesting features. Let’s take a deeper look.

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Three Part Deep Dive Explains Lattice ICE40 FPGA Details

September 27, 2018 by 15 Comments

It is no secret that we like the Lattice iCE40 FPGA. It has a cheap development board and an open source toolchain, so it is an easy way to get started developing low-cost, low-power FPGA designs. There are a few members of the family that have similar characteristics including the top-of-the-line UltraPlus. [Steve] from Lattice and [Michael Klopfer] from the University of California Irvine have a three-part video series that explain the architecture of the devices. Altogether, the videos are about an hour long and — of course — they use the official tools, not IceStorm. But it is still a great time investment if you have an iCE40 board and you want to understand what the chip has under the hood.

The first part is fairly short and talks a lot about applications. There’s also a nod to the hobbyist use of FPGAs. Keep in mind that the iCE40 FPGAs come in different sizes and variants, so don’t get excited when you see them mention a RISC-V — that isn’t going to fit in your iCEStick, that we know of. The iCEstick has a HX-1K onboard, which is the high-performance variant with 1,280 logic elements, as opposed to the low-power (LP) version.

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Compiling A $22 Logic Analyzer

December 13, 2016 by 26 Comments

On my way to this year’s Hackaday SuperConference I saw an article on EE Times about someone taking the $22 Lattice iCEstick and turning it into a logic analyzer complete with a Python app to display the waveforms. This jumped out as pretty cool to me given that there really isn’t a ton of RAM on the stick, basically none that isn’t contained in the FPGA itself.

[Jenny List] has also written about the this application as created by [Kevin Hubbard] of Black Mesa Labs and [Al Williams] has a great set of posts about using this same $22 evaluation board doing ground up Verilog design using open source tools. Even if you don’t end up using the stick as a logic analyzer over the long haul, it’ll be very easy to find many other projects where you can recompile to invent a new purpose for it.

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Icestudio: An Open Source Graphical FPGA Tool

February 23, 2016 by 38 Comments

If you’ve ever worked with FPGAs, you’ve dealt with the massive IDEs provided by the vendors. Xilinx’s ISE takes about 6 gigabytes, and Altera’s Quartus clocks in at over 10 gigs. That’s a lot of downloading proprietary software just to make an LED blink.

[Jesús Arroyo]’s Icestudio is a new, graphical tool that lets you generate Verilog code from block diagrams and run it on the Lattice Semi iCEstick development board. A drag and drop interface lets you connect IOs, logic gates, dividers, and other elements. Once your block diagram is ready, a single button press downloads the code to the iCEstick.

Under the hood, Icestudio uses IceStorm, which we’ve discussed on HaD in the past, including this great talk by [Clifford], Icestorm’s lead. For the GUI, Icestudio uses nw.js, which spits out JSON based on the block diagram. This JSON is converted into a Verilog file and a PCF file. The Verilog is used to create the logic on the FPGA, and the PCF is used to define the pin configuration for the device. Clicking on selected modules reveals the generated Verilog if you want to know what’s actually going on.

It’s experimental, but this looks like a neat way to get started on FPGAs without learning a new language or downloading many gigs of toolchains. We’re hoping Icestudio continues to grow into a useful tool for education and FPGA development. A demo follows after the break.

[Thanks to Nils for the tip!]

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Taking The Pulse (Width Modulation) Of An FPGA

December 16, 2015 by 28 Comments

I like to think that there are four different ways people use FPGAs:

  1. Use the FPGA as a CPU which allows you to add predefined I/O blocks
  2. Build custom peripherals for an external CPU from predefined I/O blocks
  3. Build custom logic circuitry from scratch
  4. Projects that don’t need an FPGA, but help you learn

I’d bet the majority of FPGA use falls into categories one and two. Some FPGAs even have CPUs already built-in. Even without an onboard CPU, you can usually put a CPU “core” (think reusable library) into the chip. Either way, you can always add other cores to create UARTs, USB, Ethernet, PWM, or whatever other I/O you happen to need. You either connect them to a CPU on the chip, or an external one. With today’s tools, you often pick what you want from a list and then your entire project becomes a software development effort.

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