MEmelony·Jul 16, 2022
If you are focusing exclusively on digital logic, why not just use HDL?
Something like
https://github.com/myhdl/myhdl
or
https://github.com/m-labs/migen
In Show HN: PyCircTools – Build digital circuits using Pythonm-labs
migen
Python2013–2022
m-labs / migen · Archived
migen
A Python toolbox for building complex digital hardware
9Distinct people
10Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.3KGitHub stars
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A Python toolbox for building complex digital hardware
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Observed mentions: 2013-01-10 13:59:43 UTC to 2022-07-16 21:42:56 UTC.
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View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
10 sourcesAll the major toolchains work on Linux. I personally liked Pynq http://www.pynq.io/, it works fairly well and is beefy enough to do non-toy projects with it. For something totally barebones you can try https://www.latticesemi.com/Products/DevelopmentBoardsAndKit..., it has the advantage that it has a very nice open source tool flow available for it: http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/. I own both boards and I work professionally with EDA tools, honestly the biggest cliff is setting up tooling and processes around a given project. If you don't want to do everything from scratch you need to either rely on proprietary libraries, which will cost you a fortune and/or lock you into a very specific tool flow (Synopsis Designware libraries). The other alternative is to use one of the open source ecosystems like https://github.com/m-labs/migen or too
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ling around Chisel or various scattered libraries of open-source components which are often hard to get to work together, but also this requires a massive amount of time investment to just get the synthesis / simulation flow working.
The situation is slowly improving and there are various university research groups and corporations that have released larger amounts of open source code that one can use as a starting point:
- https://github.com/openhwgroup/cva6 (mostly done by ETHZ people initially, also see https://github.com/pulp-platform/pulpino)
- https://github.com/chipsalliance/Cores-SweRV-EL2 (one of several high quality open-source RISC-V cores by Western Digital)
- https://github.com/chipsalliance/rocket-chip (UCB by initial creators of RISC-V)
- https://github.com/electronicvisions/nux (POWER based embedded processor, that we have used in several neuromorphic chip tapeouts (silicon proven))
On the tooling side one great thing that happened is that the verilator open source simulator has gained a lot of traction.
- https://github.com/verilator/verilator
On the hardware synthesis side some exciting developments are also happening, mostly driven by the desire of companies like Google to be vendor independent for their Deep learning accelerator designs and through funding by DARPA.
ARTIQ is a framework for real-time control of atomic physics experiments. Probably you were thinking of migen (https://github.com/m-labs/migen) which is used to implement ARTIQ.
In Turning .NET assemblies into FPGA hardwareThere's actually an open source DDR4 controller[1]. To my untrained eyes it looks quite complex. It's written in Python using Migen[2] to generate the HDL.
[1] https://github.com/enjoy-digital/litedram
[2] https://github.com/m-labs/migen
In Compiling my own SPARC CPU inside a cheap FPGAMigen: A Python toolbox for building complex digital hardware
2 points · Open discussionMigen is quite different from MyHDL. Migen folks specifically wrote about differences from MyHDL here:
https://github.com/m-labs/migen/blob/master/doc/fhdl.rst
In MyHDL – Design hardware with Python – ExamplesRelated project : https://github.com/m-labs/migen
In MyHDL – Design hardware with Python – ExamplesYou can find that here:
https://github.com/milkymist/migen
(one directory up from the OP's link)
In How FPGAs work, and why you'll buy oneLet me put this here : https://github.com/milkymist/migen/tree/master/migen
In How FPGAs work, and why you'll buy oneThis really depends on the application; but in general FPGAs are a good choice for small to medium volume software defined radio applications, including building correlators and beamformers for radio telescopes (casper.berkeley.edu). CASPER tools used to be a major user of Borph - it made the open hardware and software platforms easy to use to anyone that had experience with Linux; however its use got killed by complexity.
The biggest challenge for FPGAs is tools; the CASPER guys used Matlab Simulink; which works OK for small designs, but becomes challenging as the devices and designs grow. There are also a bunch of C to gates tools, Matlab to gates and Haskell inspired tools like Bluespec, and even some Python tools. In fact for the Berkeley CASPER group, as GPU through put improved (along with processing) and the size of the radio tele
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scopes increased, it made sense to move to a hybrid FPGA+GPU backend processor.
For fun and training we built an ARM Cortex A8 (with or without GPU and vector processor) + FPGA platform called Rhino (http://www.rhinoplatform.org), with a couple of FMC IO slots for attaching ADC/DAC/Control etc then ported Borph and then linked up with the Migen project (https://github.com/milkymist/migen) to "simplify" programming and configuring the FPGA (https://github.com/brandonhamilton/rhino-gateware). We think it works great ;-)
We have used it to build a arb. waveform radar transceiver and a few other things.
Ofcource now one has the Xilinx Zynq 7K family which includes dual core ARM and tightly coupled Xilinx V7 fabric all on a single chip. Plus for a few hundred $$ you get a nice development board (www.zedboard.org) and a frontend wirless digital receiver FMC card - http://goo.gl/qCnJM
Not sure if that helps...