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olofk
fusesoc
Python2018–2023
olofk / fusesoc

fusesoc

Package manager and build abstraction tool for FPGA/ASIC development

5Distinct people
6Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
1.5KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Package manager and build abstraction tool for FPGA/ASIC development

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

Not sure what cores will be needed for you to break out the popcorn. But there are actually quite a few cores available under open and free licenses. First off, the RISC-V…

JoachimS used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year6 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-04-22 09:05:55 UTC to 2023-02-06 18:13:48 UTC.

0122018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

6 sources
JoachimS·Jun 30, 2018Recommendation phrase
Not sure what cores will be needed for you to break out the popcorn. But there are actually quite a few cores available under open and free licenses. First off, the RISC-V community is based on the open ISA. There are several open implementations of the ISA. And the RISC-V community is meaking good headways in developing open tools, peripheral cores etc. https://riscv.org/ Secondly there are at least two attempts at collecting and tracking open cores for FPGA- and ASIC-implementations. LibreCores is the newer project. They have collected quite a few projects: https://www.librecores.org/ https://www.librecores.org/project/list Related to LibreCores is the SoC-builder and core package handler Fusesoc by Olof Kindgren. Fusesoc makes creating your SoC easy: https://github.com/olofk/fusesoc The older project is OpenCores. OpenCores has been qu
Read the rest
ite tightly related to the OpenRISC CPU core, the wishbone set of on-chip interconnect solutions. They have been used in many FPGAs and ASICs https://opencores.org/ https://openrisc.io/ Then you have projects like Cryptech that develops a complete, totally open, Hardware Security Module capable of doing certificate signing, OpenDNSSEC signing etc. The Cryptech Alpha design from PCB to FPGA cores and SW including pkcs11 handling is open. The project has amassed quite a few cores. The PCB design is available in kiCAD. (disclaimer: I'm part of the Cryptech core team doing a lot of the FPGA design work.) https://cryptech.is/ https://trac.cryptech.is/wiki/GitRepositories Speaking of tools like KiCAD, there are aqtually quite a few open tools for HW design. For simuation there are Icarus Verilog, Verilator, cver for example. They might not be as fast as VCS by Synoptsys. But they do work. I use them daily. http://iverilog.icarus.com/ https://www.veripool.org/projects/verilator/wiki/Intro For synthesis, P&R the state is less good. For implementation in Altera and Xilinx devices you currently have to use the cost free tools from the vendors. But there is work ongoing to reverse engineer Xilinx Spartan devices. I don't know the current state though. But what has been reverse engineered are the ICE40 FPGA devices from Lattice. And for these you can use the open tool Yosys by Clifford Wolf (also mentioned below by someone else). http://www.clifford.at/yosys/ And if you are looking for open implementations of crypto functions etc I have quite a few on Github and try to develop more all the time: https://github.com/secworks The sha256 and aes cores has been used in quite a few FPGA and ASIC designs. Right now I'm working on completing cores for the Blake2b and Blake2s hash functions. I agree that we in the HW community is waay behind the SW community in terms of open tools, libraries (i.e. cores). But it is not totally rotten, and it is getting better. RISC-V is to me really exciting.
In Darpa invests $100M in a silicon compiler

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