Neat project - there are already a couple of good open FPGA projects. Have a look at Dirk Koch's and the FABolous teams work. They are doing exceptional work.
But all open FPGA projects miss the IO required for a good design. They do not have any serdes hardware nor DDR IO cells.
This project seems to have a serdes block which seems to wrap whatever is in the PDK. Didn't look too far down but from a cursory glance it looked like it was built for an internal clock of 50 MHz (clock default to 20 ns) with an oversampling of 8: 400 MHz
If those numbers are at all right it puts it in useful territory. Very much so for a first spin
For a first spin it looks overall pretty useful. The only nitpick I have would be that `operation` on the DSP tile should be from fabric instead of config (hardcoded in bitstream) otherwise I don't see a convenient way of resetting the accumulator(?)
Thanks for the suggestion on the DSP. Maybe I'll add new DSP tiles that are reconfigurable and keep the config based DSP tiles. I designed Aegis's Terra 1 to be a "good enough first gen" so that's why things are the way they are. I didn't want to over commit on the design for a first generation.
Yeah, I did see there's been attempts but none really satisfied what I wanted out of it. I do know of FABulous and it seems good but not quite what I wanted. You can see that aside from yosys and nextpnr, it is quite self contained and even provides a very easy way of defining new silicon with Nix.
I know that IO is really the 2nd thing which sells FPGA's. I did design a basic serdes hardware that should just work for this first generation. I do want to do DDR IO cells in the future.
You can come work with us/for us and scale your SerDes design for us. That gets you actual wafer mask sets taped-out, a million chips and a WSI, not just test chips. A succesful SerDes will get you a job (at least in Europe).
How fast will the SerDes run, 50 Mhz? It is not clear to me from the serdes_tile.dart source code.
Can you share the verilog files?
Okay, this means reducing Innovation to a bare minimum I guess. It is baffling to me, how this giant company manages to suck at everything they touch. They managed to be unrelevant in every trend over the past decade.
This collective of stooges of the European content industry seems to be somewhat irrelevant. Never even heard of one of their "prominent" supporters. This seems like one of the thousand attempts to protect the very mediocre European domestic content industry. As a German, I have seen so many of such initiatives, often even funded by universities or state near bodies.
In music, fine arts, video games, photography there are tons of extremely successful European content producers. Cinema/TV are also quite big too (in no small part thanks to EU legislation incentivising it, but it's top notch quality so who cares, win-win-win).
Mediocre European domestic content industry? You must be thinking of a very specific niche, when it comes to fine arts and music Europe has been a leader since ever.
Unfortunately those big and famous European artists are all dead for decades/centuries. Kinda difficult to monetize today.
Not that we should enable that. Mozart, Beethoven, Vivaldi and Bach are cool, but who should be making money now from their IP? I'd say nobody, it should already be part of CC IMHO.
> Never even heard of one of their "prominent" supporters
no surprise here, you don't seem the type to appreciate art, in any form.
I guess you don't even watch Netflix...
> very mediocre European domestic content industry
Or maybe this is an attempt by artists to protect their works from being exploited by big corporations in exchange for nothing. Which is fine to me, even if their work really were mediocre, nobody can deprive authors of their rights.
Thanks for actually reading the article, and yes, my opinion is kinda similar here
It will be the same story as with Spotify, they will be happy to license it for a bit company for pennies which then again will license it upstream for a big amount
WOW. These two projects must be the most esoteric hardware projects out there. Why should anyone use code for hardware? This flux thing seems only to be useful for simple hobby projects.
It is a bummer that 802.11ah did not took of. This technology has a lot of potential and the implementation is pretty easy, also for ultra low power applicatons. But for some reason, no one is using this technology.
802.11ah has seemed to be a kind of weird in-between. It was made to be a compete in the LoRa type space but LoRa already provides cheaper to implement hardware that works significantly farther. It is indeed slower but for the target use case of intermittent low data IoT that's usually more than fine... or at least not solved often enough by the realistic throughputs of actually low powered 802.11ah devices to create a significantly larger market.
What I mean by actually low powered 802.11ah is most of the time people 347 Mb/s max speed, ignoring that's peak for for a 4x4 16 MHz channel. That's almost a different world, not even high performance laptop chips find 4x4 worth the power budget, let alone something built for IoT. If you go to the real IoT client hardware in a realistic use case of 1x1 8 MHz suddenly your realistic goodput of 10s of megabits per second but that doesn't really enable too many additional use cases and comes with the aforementioned loss of coverage area and efficiency (it's more efficient than normal Wi-Fi but it's still Wi-Fi based).
Take that into consideration and what you have is a bunch of people getting excited about high speed 900 MHz when the standard was actually designed around IoT use case and demand, losing out to competitors which do it better, cheaper, farther, and came first.
Related: There are bunch of other weird sub 1 GHz standards from 802, even some under 802.11. They tend to take advantage of the TV spectrum. I don't think any have been popular, partially because that's a more complicated spectrum to participate in.
Sadly, the bandwidth of the devices is not given anywhere. Would be really interesting for certain applications.
This is very helpful in medic applications like MRI.
Consumer application and FPGAs are an oxymoron in itself. FPGAs are used in applications requiring special interfaces, special computing units or other custom requirements. If there is enough demand, SoCs are developed for these applications, but this is only useful in mid to high volume production.
Areas like the ones you gave and many more are making heavy use of FPGAs. I work in medical for example. We are using custom designed chips for special detection purposes. But when it comes to data processing and interfacing with computers, we use FPGAs.
reply