
VHDL support for open-source FPGA toolchain YoSys - ur-whale
https://github.com/ghdl/ghdl-yosys-plugin
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leggomylibro
Cool - it's amazing how much easier FPGA development has gotten in recent
years thanks to efforts like YoSys and these sorts of frontend projects.

RISC-V has also been maturing over the same timeframe, which is bringing
mainstream open-source efforts deeper into the stack of general-purpose
computers.

We still don't have an open-source VLSI fab, but costs are always falling and
Magic has been open-source for decades, so maybe it's only a matter of time
until samizdat-style CPUs become possible :)

~~~
Palomides
it would be great to see it end up more like PCB fabrication, where anyone can
pick up open source tools and then send files off for fabrication in a few
days/weeks at moderate cost... I'd pay a few hundred just for the novelty of
getting a chip of my own design.

I do think the trends in the industry may allow this to happen in the next
decade or so.

~~~
lnsru
What chip are you missing in Digikey catalog? Does another chip makes
economically sense? I mean, one can get everything from 3 cent microprocessor
like [https://hackaday.com/2019/04/26/making-a-three-cent-
microcon...](https://hackaday.com/2019/04/26/making-a-three-cent-
microcontroller-useful/) to $50k FPGA.

~~~
imtringued
The type of chip that only Palomides owns. It would be pretty weird if it was
available on Digikey.

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ur-whale
Note that this is still beta, but this is written by Tristan Gingold, the guy
who wrote and maintains GHDL [1], a fast, high quality VHDL simulator.

It's really worth checking out, Tristan has produced very high quality work
with GHDL over the years.

This extension of yosys is actually integrating ghdl as a VHDL front-end.

[1] [http://ghdl.free.fr/](http://ghdl.free.fr/)

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krupan
This is exciting. You can do VHDL synthesis with the commercial version of
yosys now (uses the Verific commercial parser). Will be great to have an open
source solution.

GHDL is written in Ada, if you have ever wanted to see that in the wild. It
looks like this is in C++, which will probably make it easier to get
contributions

