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sylefeb
Silice
C++2020–2026
sylefeb / Silice

Silice

Silice is an easy-to-learn, powerful hardware description language, that simplifies designing hardware algorithms with parallelism and pipelines.

Languages & CompilersLearning & ReferenceHardware & EmbeddedLibraries & SDKs
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9Distinct people
12Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.4KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Silice is an easy-to-learn, powerful hardware description language, that simplifies designing hardware algorithms with parallelism and pipelines.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

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 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 10:01:16 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 year12 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2020-06-29 19:42:16 UTC to 2026-06-03 02:47:33 UTC.

02462020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 2 submissions, 4 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 comments20232024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

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
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC624
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
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

3 sources
mike_d·Mar 28, 2024
> Is the device hackable? AFAIK not at this moment. The firmware is minimal. It is a relatively new device It is just a package around an inexpensive FPGA chip. Published and un-published attacks against it exist. For these reasons the TKey developers call out "[a]ll physical and electrical attacks applied to the board [are out of scope]" in the threat model. https://hackaday.com/2018/09/27/three-part-deep-dive-explain... https://github.com/sylefeb/Silice/blob/draft/projects/ice40-... > There are protections against opening it up. I'd love to see photos if yours is any different than what is on the website.
In A simple, (as-of-yet unidentified) asymmetric Authenticated Key Exchange
sylefeb·Feb 29, 2024
Lookup tables are great to produce impressive graphics effects under strict compute limits. I use them in many FPGA projects. On FPGA there is a balance between limited memory (often BRAM) and limited compute, but they can be used to great effect: Tunnel effect (exactly as user bemmu described below): - see it live: https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/sylefeb/gf... - lookup table: https://github.com/sylefeb/gfxcat/blob/main/tunnel/tunnel.h - how it is computed: https://github.com/sylefeb/Silice/blob/master/projects/ice-v... Julia fractal, with a table to do integer multiply! (2.a.b = (a+b)^2 - a^2 - b^2, so just precompute all x^2 in a table! ) - see it live: https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/sylefeb/gf... - code (see 'sq' table): https://github.com/sylefeb/gfxcat/blob/main/julia/julia.c - credits (mul tri
Read the rest
ck): http://cowlark.com/2018-05-26-bogomandel/index.html In-hardware lookup division for perspective correct texturing! - doom-chip on-ice (rC3 2021 talk): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZAIIDXoBis - detailed write up: https://github.com/sylefeb/tinygpus?tab=readme-ov-file#preco... - actual lookup table generation: https://github.com/sylefeb/tinygpus/blob/498be1b803d0950328a... Sine tables are also very typical, for animating things on screen or plain trigonometry, for instance my small fixed integer raytracer uses a sine table to animate the spheres (and the cos is easy to get from the sin, especially if the table has a power of two size ;) ): - see it live: https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/sylefeb/gf... - source code: https://github.com/sylefeb/gfxcat/blob/main/raytrace/raytrac... And of course procedural textures!! Perlin noise is made of lookup tables, and often multiple lookups are combined to then lookup a clolormap (https://redirect.cs.umbc.edu/~ebert/691/Au00/Notes/procedura...) There are so many other examples. Also, FPGAs are quite literally made of LookUp Tables, or LUTs: - https://github.com/sylefeb/Silice/tree/master/learn-silice#f... - https://github.com/sylefeb/silixel (edit: formatting)
In How video games use lookup tables

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