Snickerdoodle board on FLOSS Weekly

I haven't watched the video since most of my computers don't have sound hooked up, so this comment may already be addressed in the video:

Snickerdoodle has a very impressive price for a Zynq board, but what's it doing on FLOSS weekly?  Don't you have to use the proprietary Xilinx Vivado software to program the Zynq FPGA?

Don't you have to use the proprietary Xilinx Vivado software to program the Zynq FPGA?

Indeed you do. Just like you need proprietary software to use any ARM SoC GPU, except for the Pi. Now if we could just get schematics for the B+ and 2.

The ARM cores on the Zynq can and do use Linux of course and its' GPU is also proprietary so like all of the others in some way or another it's a mixed bag.

And just like the GPUs, I don't really see anything in the near (or distant) future that will change the proprietary nature of business model currently in use

by all of the major. and most of the minor FPGA (or GPU) players.

I was excited to see Hackaday do a series of FPGA tutorials featuring Lattice:

Learning Verilog for FPGAs: Hardware at Last! | Hackaday

http://hackaday.com/2015/08/27/learning-verilog-for-fpgas-hardware-at-last/

for which there is an Open Source toolchain:

Project IceStorm

http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/

But my understanding is that Lattice is not on par with Xilinx and Altera.

The closed toolchain is not ideal, but this is pretty much an universal problem for FPGA design.

I think FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) is still relevant if a FPGA based project like this is releasing HDL "source code".

I've not gotten clarification on yet on whether their board is Open Source Hardware.  I hope that they will release schematics, PCB layout and BOM.  Could you comment, rcousins?

fustini We're going to be posting the schematics & BOM in the next week or two (just have a few final tweaks to make to the power supply subsystem that will further decrease the standby/sleep power consumption).

johnbeetem gdstew Of course, you could always synthesize an FPGA *in* the FPGA and run whichever open-source toolchain you'd like. While it's disappointing the tools aren't open, FPGAs are fundamentally the most open source silicon component you could ever ask for - you are in complete control over what the chip is doing at the gate level.

We can only make open the software that's in our control (with the two primary closed-source items being the FPGA toolchain and the TI radio firmware). There are numerous technical (and, of course, "business") reasons these companies haven't totally opened up these tools, but we don't really believe/have faith in the 'sit and wait' method when it comes to changing paradigms or corporate philosophies.

We just want to provide powerful tools for people to create and learn about new things. It's still possible to be a highly productive carpenter regardless of open/closed the designs of your hammer/saw/drill are. Ultimately, if enough people get this technology into their hands and truly want to affect change, we believe the "people" will find a way.

As an aside, if someone has an open FPGA toolchain that has been proven to work with Zynq, we're more than happy to try it out and see how we can support it.

-Ryan

Drew: I hope that they will release schematics, PCB layout and BOM.

Schematics and BOM definitely, never really understood the need for PCB layout unless there is a layout related problem. If there is, there is not much I can do to fix it

especially in today's 6 or more layer SBC world. Cloning ? I like seeing all the different products with different capabilities. This has not really hurt pricing competition

either as a lot of the competing SBCs' prices hover reasonably around the Raspberry Pi price and I recently bought a 1.6 GHz quad-core 1 GB Orange Pi PC for a little

less than 19 USD including shipping.

Ryan

After over 40 years I've learned to live the fact that certain things in the electronics industry are just going to be proprietary. As long as I can get good tools at reasonable prices,

which has always been the biggest problem I've had with proprietary tool sets, I can live with it. The Vivado Design Suite is free which is a very good price ! I haven't had time

to check out the licensing restrictions yet (won't really need it until March 2016) but i assume this is for non-commercial designs which is what I want to do for now anyway. I

would like to see open tool sets that would remove such restrictions available, I just don't think it is going to happen for certain products which include FPGAs and GPUs.

P.S. 99% FUNDED !!!!!!  20:41 CDT. I think we're going to make it

Drew,

I must challenge your comment re. Lattice.

Lattice are not in the same markets as Xilinx and Altera but they do make smaller and cheaper FPGAs which are vastly more accessible to small users and projects.

Take the ICE 40 range as an example, low cost parts with industry leading low power and good functionality.

The Lattice mid range parts are competitive with the X and A mid range parts.

If you want to play with the giant SOC type parts or can afford the huge state of the art parts then X and A are the only way to go.

If you want to experiment with low cost FPGA then you can use Lattice parts (chips and dev boards) from formal sales channels or rather old Altera parts (dev boards) from Chinese channels.

I've been using Lattice parts for the last 10 years (switched from X because no one there would talk to me). No regrets.

MK

Ryan Cousins wrote:

 

John Beetem gdstew Of course, you could always synthesize an FPGA *in* the FPGA and run whichever open-source toolchain you'd like. While it's disappointing the tools aren't open, FPGAs are fundamentally the most open source silicon component you could ever ask for - you are in complete control over what the chip is doing at the gate level.

I understand that FPGA vendors are afraid to release their bitstream formats for reasons that seem good to them, and so their tools are therefore proprietary.  My objection is that some projects claim that they are FLOSS (Free-as-in-Liberty Open-Source Software) when a key component cannot be programmed with FLOSS tools.  BeagleBoard and BeagleBone are up front that the GPU is proprietary and cannot be programmed with FLOSS tools, but the GPU is a small part of BeagleBoard/Bone and many projects don't need it and can therefore be fully FLOSS.  Except for the GPU, there is enough information in the TI SoC tomes to write bare-metal applications.

RasPi is more of a stretch.  As I understand it, the Broadcom documentation doesn't really give you enough information to write your own operating system and you must reverse-engineer from the Linux source code and use a "binary blob" to boot the GPU.  OTOH, they do document the GPU but I haven't heard whether RasPi users have been successful writing their own GPU applications and integrating them into actual RasPis.

Yes, FPGAs are indeed powerful components but I don't agree with calling them an "open-source silicon component".  Yes, you can use them as a component of an OSHW design, but since you can't program them using a FLOSS toolchain (except for Lattice iCE40 thanks to the amazing IceStorm) you don't have any of RMS's "four freedoms".  If the proprietary tools don't give you the correct result, you can't go into the source code and figure out why.  You have to try a bunch of "black magic" and play with different ways of expressing a design at the source code level to cajole the software into doing the right thing.  This sort of nonsense is exactly what led RMS to his crusade.

"Synthesizing an FPGA in an FPGA" can be useful, but as far as I can tell it makes terribly inefficient use of silicon resources and you cannot get good performance.  I think my Flavia project Flavia: the Free Logic Array is a wonderful tool for teaching about programmable logic, since it's small and fast: you can recompile and download a small design in a second or two.  IMO that's awesome compared to the longueurs you face using proprietary tools -- assuming you have the patience to download them in the first place and get the license to work.  OTOH, Flavia is really only suitable for small projects.  You can do a much bigger project with a tiny Lattice iCE40-HX1K and IceStorm than you can do with Flavia and the much larger Xilinx Spartan-6 LX9.

Now, maybe there's a much better way to do an "FPGA within an FPGA".  However, I would think that if it were possible and practical we would have seen it by now.

I should also mention that Flavia and other projects that manipulate Xilinx bitstreams can only do so because of the availability of Xilinx Design Language (XDL): Taming the Wild Bitstream.  I think I read somewhere that XDL is no longer available with Vivado.  I don't know if there's a substitute for it.

johnbeetem By that logic, no ARM or x86 project or platform could *ever* be considered "FLOSS." Is anyone expecting ARM or Intel to provide the masks for their chips? How do you change the arrangement of the gates on the STM32 sitting on my desk? I'm a bit confused as to why FPGAs are somehow held to a different standard of "openness" than any other (closed) silicon component simply because they give you more granular control over the function and configuration of the chip. Oh, and the tools are free.

Ignoring that for a moment, Zynq has a hard ARM core and you can use any open source tool you'd like to do whatever you want with the microprocessor - the I/O are simply routed through the programmable fabric (using the same AXI busses as any other ARM uC/uP).

michaelkellett Hopefully a $55 board with an ARM processor, FPGA, and wireless falls into the category of 'low cost' - we've even taken care of the "talking to Xilinx" part for you

Thanks, gdstew! Fully funded this morning...

The Zynq is not in the running re low cost FPGAs  (and isn't meant to be) - the Lattice parts are MUCH simpler, come in packages you can hand solder (at least some of them) and in volume can cost less than $1 - not aimed at the same market at all.

But the cost of using a Zynq or any other SOC FPGA isn't just money - in order to get it to do anything much (ie to make serious use of the processor) you need a full blown OS which implies many megabytes of code - which will be sourced from a third party somehow (free or whatever).

If the application needs all this that's fine but if you just want an FPGA you'll do better not to have to maintain all the other stuff. In a lot of my work we end up with an FPGA (small by X standards at between 8 and 35k LUTs) and a Cortex M4 micro - if the Zynq chip was free we still wouldn't use it because the total cost of building and maintaining the product would go up.

Finally, how can I put this nicely, when a snag occurs with a chip you need to talk directly to the people who made it - the last thing you need is someone else doing your talking.

Your board may well be very nice (it's certainly a cheap way of getting  a Zynq chip)  and I wish you well with it but the cost of actually doing anything is only dominated by the cost of a dev board in home/hobby projects.

MK