
Arduino MKR Vidor 4000 – Arduino, Cyclone 10 FPGA, MiniPCI Express, MicroHDMI - peter_d_sherman
https://www.arduino.cc/en/Guide/MKRVidor4000
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ChuckMcM
The $75 price point is okay.

Not sure what this is trying to be other than an eval board for 'also rans' in
the FPGA and Cortex-M space. One of the reasons I like the Lattice FPGA boards
like the Icebreaker[1] is that there is a complete open source tool chain for
them. Seems like adding a processor to something like that might be an
interesting place.

[1] [https://www.crowdsupply.com/1bitsquared/icebreaker-
fpga](https://www.crowdsupply.com/1bitsquared/icebreaker-fpga)

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
Cyclone outclasses any ICE40 out there. If you need the logic capacity or
peripherals your options become constrained. The sad thing is that we _had_
cheap Spartan-3's and Spartan-6's with impressive resources but the vendors
didn't want to keep making devices with that sort of bang for the buck.

~~~
analognoise
You can still buy Spartan 3 and 6 devices - last I checked they're even still
being manufactured.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
The tooling is not supported with bug fixes.

~~~
robert_foss
Another strike for Xilinx tooling then. Open source tooling can't come soon
enough.

~~~
lnsru
Same open source discussion again. I’ll try to explain short why it will never
happen. Since FPGAs have applications outside hobbyist domain, things are
getting complicated. There are lawyers involved, support contracts signed and
vendors are liable for their silicon. Now imagine some open source toolchain
is used and some problems occur. Who’s liable? No single vendor will invest a
penny into something maintained by somebody else. No single manager on this
world will allow me to use 3rd party tools without vendor’s support for €1M
FPGA design. There is no business case for silicon vendor to open source
anything. Maybe brave hackers will reverse engineer bitstream generation, but
this knowledge will be used only among hackers and their friends. Personally I
don’t see any advantage using these tools and writing this in my resume,
because nobody will use them in industry anyway.

~~~
0xcde4c3db
> Maybe brave hackers will reverse engineer bitstream generation

As far as I know, the bitstream for 15K/35K/50K Artix-7 is pretty much done,
with Kintex-7 and Zynq devices being WIP [1]. I think there are gaps in
support for the various hard blocks and PAR at higher layers of the toolchain,
but the bitstream reverse engineering _per se_ isn't a maybe-in-the-future
thing.

[1]
[https://github.com/SymbiFlow/prjxray](https://github.com/SymbiFlow/prjxray)

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magicalhippo
That thing came out over a year ago, and the page hasn't been updated in
nearly as long. From what I've understood you don't get direct access to the
FPGA, rather they've made a few basic peripherals like SPI, UART etc that you
can enable.

So it is more like a configurable microcontroller, rather than a fully
programmable FPGA, at least that's my understanding.

Which I guess makes sense, given that FPGA programming isn't exactly n00b
friendly from what I've gathered.

~~~
inamberclad
Seeing as there's a SystemVerilog tutorial on the Arduino website, I'm hopeful
for more.

~~~
achuwilson
Here you go. I have followed this guide to program the fpga from the Intel
Quartus IDE [http://smartaleks.io/?p=260](http://smartaleks.io/?p=260)

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ryanmjacobs
Shameless self-plug for something similar in the market: WebFPGA
([https://webfpga.io/kickstarter](https://webfpga.io/kickstarter)). This
service actually exposes the full FPGA and allows you to synthesize Verilog
remotely (or offline).

~~~
peter_d_sherman
Love your project!

Now it has its own article on HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21057511](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21057511)

Remember to upvote!

(Oh, and "You're welcome!" :-) <g>)

~~~
ryanmjacobs
Great! Thank you! I definitely see a lot of room for improvement in this
field.

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m0zg
Question for experts in the field: are there any reasonable FPGA options
capable of hosting a small (~2MiB) quantized deep learning model for which
there's any sort of a viable, open toolchain?

I've looked into some of Lattice's stuff, and some of their chips seem pretty
capable for this, but as with all the other FPGA manufacturers, the toolchain
is crazy proprietary. I'm not a huge fan of sinking my time into tooling I
have no control over.

~~~
analognoise
There is an open source syntheses and bitstream generation for some lattice
devices.

It has inferior QoR compared to the closed toolchain.

~~~
robert_foss
I think in one of the CCCamp19 talks, the ECP5 routing with the OpenSource
tooling blew the Lattice tooling out of the water.

FPGA manufacturers have pretty perverse incentives when it comes to filling
your FPGA devices up with useless junk.

~~~
analognoise
Link to talk? My Google Fu fails me.

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lnsru
Is the VHDL or Verilog code for MicroHDMI and CSI-2 interfaces available
somewhere?

Not sure if this board will be wild success. Diligent has better boards with
Xilinx Artix-7 for this price. Arrow MAX1000 is even more affordable. Intel
MAX10 is a great device! Learning FPGA means always learning quirks of
vendor’s IDE.

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LIV2
Title is slightly misleading, it isss the mini-pci express connector but the
FPGA itself can't talk pci-express as it lacks the necessary transceivers

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trollied
Link to the actual board: [https://store.arduino.cc/mkr-
vidor-4000](https://store.arduino.cc/mkr-vidor-4000)

€62.90

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panpanna
Can someone try Clifford Wolf's tiny risc-v on this fpga?

I'm mainly interested in size and speed for this specific chip and speed
grade.

