FPGA-Toolchain

Introduction

Multi-platform nightly builds of open source FPGA tools.

Currently included:

• Yosys: RTL synthesis with extensive Verilog 2005 support
• GHDL Yosys Plugin: experimental VHDL synthesis, built in to Yosys for your convenience!
• GHDL: CLI tool supporting the Yosys plugin
• SymbiYosys: Yosys-based formal hardware verification
• Boolector: Engine for SymbiYosys
• Yices2: Engine for SymbiYosys
• Z3: Engine for SymbiYosys
• Project Trellis: Tools for working with Lattice ECP5 bitstreams
• Project IceStorm: Tools for working with Lattice ICE40 bitstreams
• nextpnr: Timing-driven place and route for both ICE40 and ECP5 architectures
• dfu-util: Device Firmware Upgrade Utilities
• ecpprog: A basic driver for FTDI based JTAG probes, to program ECP5 FPGAs
• openFPGALoader: Universal utility for programming FPGA

These tools are under active development (as are these build scripts), so please be prepared for things to break from time to time. In most cases you should be able to roll back to an older version while you wait for a fix.

Builds run at 0400 UTC daily from the master branch of each project.

Installation

1. Download an archive matching your OS from the releases page.
2. Extract the archive to a location of your choice
3. Add the bin folder to your PATH.
4. (optional, not needed on Windows) If you would like to use the experimental GHDL Yosys plugin for VHDL, you will need to set the GHDL_PREFIX environment variable. e.g. export GHDL_PREFIX=<install_dir>/fpga-toolchain/lib/ghdl

Windows users that prefer to use WSL can download fpga-toolchain-linux* to build under WSL and then use the native tools from fpga-toolchain-progtools-windows* to program their boards (since USB devices are not currently accessible in the WSL environment).

If you see errors about missing libraries (.so/.dll/.dylib) please report them in an issue here.

Getting Help

If you run into issues with these tools, please consider reporting an issue to the authors of the tools - we are just compiling them here! If you think your issue relates to the way we have compiled them then it is more appropriate to open a GitHub issue here.

If you aren't sure where to report your issue or don't feel it fits on GitHub, you can also try sending a message in the #open-tool-forge channel on 1BitSquared's Discord server or 1BitSquared's Forum.

Related Projects

For portable WASM builds of these tools, check out YoWASP. Also check out nMigen for a powerful python-based approach to hardware description.

Credits

This is built on the work done by Sean Cross (xobs) for fomu-toolchain, which was built on the original work by FPGAWars:

• Jesús Arroyo Torrens
• Juan González (Obijuan)
• Carlos Venegas
• Miodrag Milanovic

Development

Build:

bash build.sh linux_x86_64

Clean:

bash clean.sh linux_x86_64

Target architectures:

• linux_x86_64
• windows_amd64
• darwin

Final packages will be deployed in the _packages/build_ARCH/ directories.

NOTE: libftdi1.a and libusb-1.0.a files have been generated for Linux using the Tools-system scripts to allow static linking without a dependency on libudev (which is part of systemd and doesn't make for very portable binaries).

License

Licensed under a GPL v3 and Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.