DevConf.CZ 2020

FPGAs provide the performance, power efficiency and flexibility needed to meet increasing complexity, diversity and dynamicity of data center workloads. However, despite becoming increasingly ubiquitous, this promise of FPGAs has thus far been largely unfulfilled. This is due to proprietary tooling which not only limits functionality and performance, but also exposes numerous attack surfaces.
In this talk, we will present a completely open toolchain for FPGAs that can perform Synthesis, Place&Route and Board Programming without using any vendor software. This toolchain will not only allow developers to better target the underlying device architecture, but will also open the floodgates for innovation as we can start to leverage FPGAs in a more effective and secure manner. We will also demonstrate a prototype of the toolchain on the Lattice ECP5 FPGA board, by implementing core logic components such as external interfaces (CPU, Network), RISC-V cores and custom application pipelines.