Hi All,

Registration is now open for the 72nd meeting, which is being held in partnership with the BCS OSSG. Details below.

Also a reminder that the OSHCamp 2019 call closes in a little under a month, on Monday 8th April! Still plenty of opportunity to submit talk and workshop proposals and there is an online form at:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Bd2FHzkjehF-7zD386xbJ1ujrVcWWPoe_As1WOYnrQM...

Any questions don't hesitate to get in touch.

Cheers,

Andrew

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Event #72 — Open Source FPGA Hardware and Tooling Past, Present and Future.

On 21 March 2019, 18:30 - 20:30 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA.

Registration: http://oshug.org/event/72

Once upon a time we could only use proprietary tools and development boards supplied by FPGA vendors. This all changed in 2016 with the advent of the IceStorm open source toolchain, combined with open hardware like the myStorm board. With the 2nd generation of tools and hardware, sophisticated FPGA features are opening exciting avenues for 'open source all the way down'. We hope to provide an update and crystal ball on where some of this could be leading to.

— Tools: past to present

David Shah looks at where we have come from with the IceStorm toochain, and looks at how this has developed recently and expanded Lattice iCE40 support to include new lower power, lower cost, reduced pin count FPGAs to include their Ultra & Ultra Plus range.

— Hardware: past to present

Alan Wood talks about the journey through the early history of open source FPGA open hardware from IcoBoard through myStorm too recent UltraPlus offerings recently made available.

— Tools: present to future

IceStorm was aimed at a narrow family of iCE40 FPGAS, the new SymbiFlow family of tools expands the open source tooling exponentially. David Shah takes a look at NextPNR, which lies at the heart of the toolset and deals with specific FPGA family functionality, in particular he concentrates on the Lattice ECP5 family support he has developed with Project Trellis as part of NextPNR and the recent 1.0 version supporting this new family and high end FPGA features.

— Hardware: present to future

What comes next for open source FPGA hardware, after the success of tinyFPGA and myStorm we are beginning to see ECP5 open source hardware emerging, first with Radiona's ULX3S and being followed up by offerings from both tinyFPGA and myStorm dev board stables. With new hardware comes new features building on NextPNRs tooling, like DSP, SerDES I/O gearing and DDR memory etc. Alan plots the course for these new powerful opesource development boards.

— Demos

Time permitting we can show some of what's possible with the new tools in a brave new 'open source all the way down' world.

* David Shah is a engineer at Symbiotic EDA and a Electronic and Information Engineering student at Imperial College London. He entered the world of open source FPGAs by extending Project Icestorm, the iCE40 bitstream documentation project, to include the newer iCE40 UltraPlus FPGAs. As well developing Project Trellis, he has been involved in the development of a new open source FPGA place-and-route tool, nextpnr.

* Alan Wood has been working with parallel distributed programming for several decades. His recent work includes smart grids, 3D printers, robotics, automation, biotec diagnostics and designing FPGA dev boards. His current research is focused on machine learning for embedded automation using FPGAs. He is a long term advocate of open source communities, a moderator (aka Folknology) for xCORE, the co-founder of myStorm open hardware FPGA community, as well as a co-founder of Surrey and Hampshire Makerspace.

Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt.