Kilsyth

WIP! WIP! WIP!

This repo is a work in progress and far from release-worthy. Please don’t make your own boards and expect any kind of support. However, it might reach a stable point sometime in the future (as of 2019-01).

Kilsyth: ECP5 FPGA + FT60x FIFO

Kilsyth is a piece of hardware that contains an FPGA (Lattice ECP5) and a SuperSpeed USB 3.0 FIFO-bridge (FT60x). The goal is to provide a platform to be able to transfer high speed data transfers between a PC and an FPGA. The FPGA in turn can do whatever - e.g. interface with SDR, video capture, act as a logic analyzer.

Current status

It’s still in the early bring-up phase. Initial verification shows that it actually seems to work.

RevA

RevA is the first prototype and has been designed and built.

• It doesn’t smoke when powered up.
• USB-C connector works but is messy to solder.
• Loopback test is almost in place. Using the proprietary driver, high bi-directional speeds are achieavable (> 98MB/s in both directions simultaneously). Just need to figure out some off-by-one errors…
• Bootloader to store a custom bitstream on the flash.

Errata:

• C9 is not a GPIO on ECP5 F12 and some other variants. To get the LED working put a jumper on pin 31 and 33 on the Wide connector.
• FT_CLK is not routed to a clock pin. Can be fixed with a bodge wire! Remove R50 and R36, swap their paths.
• JTAG connector has a funky footprint on the PCB because CCW vs Odd/Even pinout on the symbol vs footprint. But the PCB silk screen is accurate so don’t worry - it’s just a stupid pinout.
• Need to add pull-ups for the SPI flash.

RevB

Ideas for RevB are still being collected. Feel free to suggest changes in an issue.

• Add support for reversible USB-C connector using PI5USB30213A.

Software usage (TODO)

Requires a patched migen and a patched ftdi library.. Nasty, I know, sorry.

Help:
$ python -m software.kilsyth -h

Run blinky:
$ python -m software.kilsyth run blinky

Contact

Reach out to @kbeckmann on Twitter or IRC/Freenode.