Native FPGA Tools

Native tool bundles for synthesis & PnR. These bundles are used in EDAcation to provide native Yosys & Nextpnr tools without having to download the entire OSS CAD Suite tarball.

Goals

This project has the following main goals:

• Universal: The selected tools should be available for the widest possible range of platforms;
• Usable: Every tool should come with all the necessary dependencies such that no additional setup is required;
• Minimal: Only the bare minimum should be contained in every tarball for the tool to run, nothing more.

Supported Tools & Platforms

The following tools are supported:

• nextpnr-ecp5
• nextpnr-generic
• nextpnr-ice40
• nextpnr-nexus
• yosys

The following platforms are supported:

• darwin-arm64
• darwin-x64
• linux-arm64
• linux-x64
• windows-x64

How To Use

To get an index of the currently supported tools, issue a GET request to the following URL:

https://github.com/EDAcation/native-fpga-tools/releases/latest/download/tools.json

The response is a JSON document that looks as follows:

{
  "version": "2024-07-09",
  "tools": [
    {
      "friendly_name": "Nextpnr (Generic)",
      "tool": "nextpnr-generic",
      "arch": "darwin-arm64",
      "version": "5cecaba",
      "download_url": "https://github.com/edacation/native-fpga-tools/releases/download/2024-07-09/darwin-arm64-nextpnr-generic.tgz"
    },
    ...
  ]
}

Downloading the tool will result in a gzipped tarball (.tgz, .tar.gz) with the following directory structure:

<platform>-<tool-name>/
  bin/
    <tool-name>
    <other-executables>
  lib/
  license/
  share/

Only the <platform>-<tool-name>/bin/<tool-name> file is guaranteed to exist.

Thanks

Many thanks to yosysHQ for Yosys, Nextpnr, oss-cad-suite-build and many other tools and repositories that we heavily rely on.