On 19/10/15 19:27, Jeremy Bennett wrote:
On 19/10/15 19:04, Michael Dorrington wrote:
On 19/10/15 16:08, Jeremy Bennett wrote:
On 19/10/15 15:21, Michael Dorrington wrote:
If you have experience of Free Software workflow on PIC microcontrollers (particularly assembler and upload) or FPGA (particularly place-and-route) then please could you let me know on or off list.
Hi Mike,
Not done much with PIC - if they will hide their free tool chain away, then they can't expect me to use it.
The Microchip tool chain is non-free. :( On improving my searching, I've found `gputils` which looks to do the job:
Hi Mike,
I was particularly referring to their GNU tool chain, which is (by definition) free, but I have always struggled to find the source code.
Do Microchip use a modified version of GCC? Looking at the GCC docs it doesn't support PIC microcontrollers, from what I can tell. However GCC does support other microcontrollers.
On FPGA, have you seen chiphack.org? There was also a talk at ORCONF last week on free EDA tools. Videos should be up very shortly.
Are the tools all Free Software?
- Quartus II Web Edition * ModelSim Altera Starter Edition *
OpenRISC 1000 toolchain
The backend tools are not free (see comment below). For simulation, ChipHack also addresses the use of Verilator and Icarus Verilog for simulation, but in a 2 day course, we have to some extent to rely on what works out of the box, which is ModelSim embedded in the Quartus tools.
Good to know there are Free Software simulators available.
The OpenRISC 1000 tool chain is of course fully open source, as is the source Verilog.
This is great.
Particularly, is the place-and-route bit Free Software?
No - the talk at ORCONF was the first time anyone has succeeded in building any free and open synthesis tool that works. It was the result of a fantastic reverse engineering exercise by Clifford Wolf, and works for one FPGA chip from one of the smaller FPGA companies.
This is great news. Hope it inspires others.
This isn't going to change much until a FPGA company goes open kimono on its technology. No sign of that anytime soon, although it would be an interesting disruption strategy for one of the smaller players.
Hopefully things will get better.
Cheers, Mike.