HS Alliance
SAN FRANCISCO, February 24, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — CHIPS Alliance, the leading consortium advancing common and open source hardware for interfaces, processors and systems, today established the FOSS Flow For FPGA (F4PGA) Working Group to pilot open source tools source, intellectual property and research efforts for FPGAs.
FPGA vendors such as Xilinx (now part of AMD) and QuickLogic, industrial FPGA users and contributors such as Google and Antmicro, and universities including Brigham Young University, University of Pennsylvania, princeton university and University of Torontocan now collaborate officially under the aegis of the new F4PGA working group.
“FPGAs are essential for a wide variety of low-latency computing use cases, from telecommunications to space applications and beyond. This new F4PGA toolchain will enable a software-based approach to building FPGA gateware, making code integration easier than ever,” said Rob Hands, CEO of CHIPS Alliance. “Under the umbrella of the CHIPS Alliance, this working group will help unite current FPGA efforts so that academics and industry leaders can collaborate to accelerate open FPGA innovation.
Early F4PGA projects focus on the free and open source FPGA toolchain formerly known as SymbiFlow, as well as the FPGA exchange format, which is designed to enable interoperability between open-source and closed-source FPGA toolchains. CHIPS Alliance new Xilinx member, now part of AMD, worked with Google and Antmicro to develop the interchange format definition and associated tools to provide a development standard for the entire FPGA industry. The FPGA interchange format allows developers to switch quickly and easily from one tool to another, reducing entry barriers for the entire supply chain – from FPGA vendors to academics and users of FPGAs.
In addition to the work around the FPGA exchange format, several members of the CHIPS Alliance have collaborated on the FPGA Tool Performance Framework. This open FPGA tooling project provides a complete end-to-end FPGA synthesis flow and FPGA performance profiling framework, allowing developers to analyze FPGA designs by examining metrics such as clock frequency, resource usage and run time.
Members of the CHIPS Alliance have also worked on the development of the FPGA assembly format (FASM). The FPGA Assembly Format (FASM) is a textual format specifying which FPGA functionality should be enabled or disabled; the textual nature of FASM makes it easy to parse and experiment with in different designs.
Industry support for open FPGA tools has continued to grow, with QuickLogic becoming the first company to fully adopt the open source FPGA toolchain in 2020, and now with Xilinx’s participation in the FPGA Interchange project. Strong support from the F4PGA working group promises to help further accelerate industry adoption in all geographies and increase confidence in open source FPGA tools as a viable option for all types of designs .
To learn more about the F4PGA Working Group, please visit: https://chipsalliance.org/workgroups/.
About the CHIPS Alliance
The CHIPS Alliance is an organization that develops and hosts high quality open source hardware code (IP cores), interconnect IPs (physical and logical protocols) and open source software development tools for design, verification , etc The main objective is to provide a barrier-free collaborative environment, in order to reduce the cost of developing intellectual property and hardware development tools. The CHIPS Alliance is hosted by the Linux Foundation. For more information, visit chipsalliance.org.
About the Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation and its projects are supported by more than 1,800 members. The Linux Foundation is the world’s leading hub for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation projects are essential to global infrastructure, including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, Hyperledger, RISC-V, and more. The Linux Foundation methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and meeting the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create enduring models of open collaboration. For more information, visit linuxfoundation.org.
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Sandra Jackson
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CHIPS SOURCE Alliance