On Friday, April 8, 2022 at 8:52:17 PM UTC-4, Paul Rubin wrote:
"myronp...@gmail.com" <myronp...@gmail.com> writes:
The users' manual (forthBoard.pdf) can be downloaded from https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PN6igK_-DLcrx2OWT1H5mXyfrT4OAAq3/view?usp=sharing
This is nice, is it your design? It reminds me a little of the b16 and GreenArrays cpus, which I guess is unsurprising. Can you run it on
other FPGA boards? How many LUTs etc. does it require? Are you going
to make a chip? You can get it fabbed in 130nm for free:
https://www.fossi-foundation.org/2020/06/30/skywater-pdk
It would be cool if someone here did that.
Dear Paul,
It is my design, but is influenced by Chuck Moore's chips Mup21, F21, and ShBoom.
Being written in Verilog, the possibility of implementing it on other FPGA platforms is open. But note that the Xilinx Vivado wizards used to generate the Series7 MMCM clock generator and XADC A/D convertor IP cores produced files with prominent
copyright notices, so they are missing from from my source files offering. FPGA pin number/attribute assignments would also need to be redefined.
Resource usage:
LUT 907 of 14600
FF 934 of 29200
BRAM 36 of 45
DSP 2 of 80
IO 56 of 150
BUFG 2 of 32
MMCM 1 of 3
(no XADC report!)
Being reliant on many Series7 hardware fabric features, I have no desire to attempt a chip fab, PCB design, SMT board assembly, etc.
I hope to spark a community of Cmod S7 users that shares their hardware/software adventures like in the pioneering 8-bit days. AFAIK, there have been hundreds (if not thousands) of units purchased by end users like me.
My next steps:
1) Acquire 3 more units (ordered, awaiting delivery).
2) Attempt to burn fresh units using Xilinx Vivado from the existing config files. This would skip rerunning the MMCM and XADC (GUI) wizards and the synthesis and implementation phases.
3) Document the resulting procedure and revise the users' manual to include it. 4) Continue to provide a zipped snapshot of the design files and forthBoard applications source code examples to anyone who requests it, for free.
- Myron
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)