John Beetem's IceStorm Notes

RE: John Beetem's IceStorm Notes

Former Member — Tue, 05 Apr 2016 02:42:55 GMT

Hi; can anyone give me a bit of advice? I'm pretty new to these tools, and I've run into a problem I'm not quite sure how to fix.

I currently have access to an ICE40-HX8K development board I am trying to use, and I have followed the above notes and other reference materials at "Project IceStorm " and similar.

So far I seem to have everything compiled and working in a fresh Ubuntu 14.04 virtual machine, but on trying to run the demo file via arachne-pnr; "arachne-pnr -d 8k -p rot.pcf rot.blif -o rot.txt", I get the output;

seed: 1

device: 8k

read_chipdb +/share/arachne-pnr/chipdb-8k.bin...

supported packages: cb132, cb132:4k, cm121, cm121:4k, cm225, cm225:4k, cm81, cm81:4k, ct256, tq144:4k

read_blif rot.blif...

rot.pcf:1: fatal error: unknown pin '99' on package 'ct256'

Note that I specify an "8k" device, rather than the default. I'm under the impression I should do that for the larger FPGA chip I'm using. I generated the .blif file via;

yosys -p "synth_ice40 -blif rot.blif" rot.v

And yeah. I'm unsure of how to solve this issue, or whether I'm missing/doing something silly. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

RE: John Beetem's IceStorm Notes

Former Member — Thu, 15 Oct 2015 15:20:17 GMT

Hi [mention:fbb6a29175924ef2b9847498e58a0842:e9ed411860ed4f2ba0265705b8793d05] . Thank you for taking the time to publish your notes on this. It looks very promising!

RE: John Beetem's IceStorm Notes

johnbeetem — Fri, 07 Aug 2015 03:06:48 GMT

I updated the installation instructions for the 19 July 2015 IceStorm, which includes the iCE40 HX8K. IceStorm software is now at GitHub, so the instructions have changed.

RE: John Beetem's IceStorm Notes

johnbeetem — Thu, 23 Jul 2015 15:14:21 GMT

IceStorm now supports the HX8K-CT256. That's a pretty powerful chip.

RE: John Beetem's IceStorm Notes

johnbeetem — Thu, 23 Jul 2015 15:10:20 GMT

I had the opportunity to talk to a Lattice engineer yesterday at the Embedded Systems Conference. He had of course heard about IceStorm and I wasn't the first to ask about it. He said that Lattice doesn't seem to have any issues about IceStorm -- everybody's he's talked to has been positive and nobody has said that they need to shut it down. He sees it as an opportunity for new ideas in FPGA software rather than a threat to the company.

My opinion is that IceStorm has raised the level of interest in Lattice FPGAs and that's got to help them. Lattice sees huge opportunities ahead for cheap FPGAs. Xilinx and Altera seem more interested in selling smaller numbers of much more expensive chips.

RE: John Beetem's IceStorm Notes

DAB — Sat, 11 Jul 2015 19:50:07 GMT

Be careful about reverse engineering devices.

Some companies still consider their techniques proprietary even if you figure them out on your own.

So you might want to check with the original maker of the FPGA to see if they have any problems with you making your open source version of their product.

Just a thought,

DAB