FPGA open source toolchain installation for Debian
FPGA open source toolchain installation for Debian
The problem
I have an iceFUN FPGA development board. This uses an ice40 FPGA and an open source toolchain to convert Verilog to a binary file which can be loaded onto the FPGA. I used to follow the instructions here to install the packages required for the open source FPGA toolchain. These instructions no longer work for me under Debian, except for the arachne package. There are too many conflicting dependencies required.
The packages that I need to build the binary files from Verilog are:
The solution
There are now Debian packages to install all of the toolchain, apart from arachne. To install yosys, icestorm and nextpnr:
sudo aptitude install yosys
sudo aptitude install fpga-icestorm
sudo aptitude install nextpnr-ice40
nextpnr has other FPGA family options, such as nextpnr-generic. Have a look on the project’s Github page for more information.
To install arachne:
git clone https://github.com/cseed/arachne-pnr.git arachne-pnr
cd arachne-pnr
make -j$(nproc)
sudo make install
Discussion
It is great that some people took the time and trouble to package up the build tools. Thanks, whoever you are.
When I first installed the toolchain, following the build instructions at clifford.at worked fine. Once this stopped working, it took me a while to figure out that I should look for Debian installation packages instead of trying to build the packages. Hopefully, this page will help some other folk get rolling.
The toolchain is used by many other FPGA boards.