Hypercube FPGA Board - IceZUM Remix
Hypercube FPGA Board - IceZUM Remix
- We try to make Hypercube FPGA board.
- For this we choose to remix an existing open source KiCAD project IceZUM by FPGAwars.
Background Information
- This project made possible by Clifford Wolf at http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/ who made an open source tool chain for programming Lattice FPGA
- This has been used by FPGAwars team http://fpgawars.github.io/ to build an open sourced FPGA ecosystem - https://github.com/FPGAwars
- FPGAwars have an FPGA tuition board icezum_master.zip (from https://github.com/fpgawars/icezum/ 2018-06-10)
- The project is in KiCAD 4 layer PCB and it is well curated with 3D models. It opens with few hitches in a Linux PC (one item in section User Peripherals / User switches missing schematic symbol).
- The chip has 1K LUTs (Look Up Tables) which is great for educational use. The datasheet for the chip is from Lattice: iCE40LPHXFamilyDataSheet.pdf (Version 3.4, October 2017)
- The IceZUM brings out around 20 pins for users. A lot more are available, so the remix of the IceZUM will try to bring out as many pins to FPC connectors which can then control many more peripherals. With a bigger board, the design can probably be moved from 4 layer to 2 layer
Original IceZUM board by FPGAwars
- Another project by FPGAwars is Icestudio. Icestudio runs in Linux and is free to download and use.
- Icestudio implements a graphical design program for creating FPGA functions and wiring them together. This is then converted to Verilog which then taken by the open source tool chain and converted into bitstreams to program the lattice FPGA chips.
IceStudio by FPGAwars
- Icestudio supports a range of boards, and so it should run with Hypercube FPGA remix board as its a simple remix of the original open sourced Icezum board (with more pins) which is supported by Icestudio.
