fpga-toolchain-experiment's Introduction

fpga-toolchain-experiment

An initial investigation into a viable FPGA development toolchain.

The scope of this investigation is:

To determine whether Spinal-HDL can be used with Maven, not SBT (as Maven is the defacto standard, and I greatly prefer it);
- It requires a scalac compiler plugin. When attempting to run the CounterMain program after a 'straight' maven compilation, Spinal failed with 'dslScope stack is not empty'; Spinal-HDL 1.4.0 release notes and a search on Gitter suggested the sbt plugin is required. (At this point, I thought it MUST need sbt...)
- Instructions on how to use SpinalHDL only mention SBT.
- Got it working fine with SBT, but want to use Maven.
- Tried to use https://sbt-compiler-maven-plugin.github.io/sbt-compiler-maven-plugin/1.0.0/sbt-compiler-maven-plugin/compile-mojo.html to use the sbt compiler directly from maven, specifying the Spinal compiler plugin. This did not work - this maven plugin might only support very old versions of sbt. 0.13, 0.14 not the more recent 1.3.3 that SpinalHDL uses.
- Noticed that the scala-maven-plugin supports the addition of a scalac plugin. Tried to use the 'SBT' plugin, and it generated code that ran successfully to produce VHDL. Yes! I no longer have to endure the 'blinding pain' of sbt!
Develop maven plugins to make developing VHDL via Spinal HDL with Maven easier, as necessary?
To see if Spinal-HDL can output VHDL suitable for use with Lattice Diamond for the Mach XO2 board.
How to simulate designs built in Spinal-HDL.
How to test designs built in Spinal-HDL, via Maven Surefire/JUnit 5, develop DSLs to assist as necessary.