Kilsyth: ECP5 FPGA and a USB 3.0 FIFO bridge

This project has not gotten a lot of my attention since I made the first rev and initial bringup.

However, people seem to find their way here and I thought I'd just leave a note about the current status of the project.

This board was designed in a rush, in order to get it done for 35C3, 2018-12-27. The goal was to have a cheap ECP5 board with a high speed PC interface and a bunch of IOs.

What is working?

• ECP5 FPGA works
  • It can be configured through JTAG.
  • Clock input from FT600 and oscillator works.
  • SDRAM works.
  • Have tested a LiteX build using SDRAM and micropython.
• FT600 interface works
  • Can make transfers to and from the FPGA at maximum speed that the FT600 can handle, i.e. 200 MB/s.
  • USB-C connector and routing works, however it's a pain to solder since the pads are small and it has a row of hidden pads behind the outer row. Found a different connector with pins for the hidden row instead, UJ31-CH-31-SMT-TR.  Have tried it and it is much easier to rework.

What needs to be fixed?

• FT_CLK is not routed to a clock input
• The JTAG connector has a weird pinout.
• Pin 33 on the wide connector is NC on the 12F variant
• Flash needs pull-resistors.
• Improve routing for high speed IOs. Even if no high speed connector is used, the signals should be routed and exposed together (A and B pins from the FPGA).

Software?

• Started working on a migen project that was supposed to expose an easy way to communicate with the FPGA at high speeds.
• Initial code sort of works but relies on the proprietary drivers which is a pain.
• Still requires the fpga to be programmed through JTAG. Need a bootloader that loads the bitstream to flash and boots into it.
• Got bored and haven't made any significant progress in a while.

RevB

I started working on a RevB but haven't really done any progress since I got stuck trying to figure out which high speed connectors to use. HDMI, SATA, USB-C, SYZYGY ...

At this point this project is pretty much on hold indefinitely. I started a dedicated HDMI capture/transmit project here, however after I learned about the Camlink and the reverse engineering progress that has already been made with that, there is no point in continuing that project.

However!

I made another board for 36C3, 2019-12-27, called pergola. That project is very much alive, please check it out instead. hackaday.io project page.