nextpnr -- a portable FPGA place and route tool

Supported Architectures

• iCE40

Prequisites

• CMake 3.3 or later
• Modern C++11 compiler (clang-format required for development)
  • Note: clang may run out of memory building the chipdbs (peak memory ~11GB) due to the system currently used. Use gcc, or the 1k-only flag, if this causes a problem.
• Qt5 or later (qt5-default for Ubuntu 16.04)
• Python 3.5 or later, including development libraries (python3-dev for Ubuntu)
• Boost libraries (libboost-dev or libboost-all-dev for Ubuntu)
• Icestorm, with chipdbs installed in /usr/local/share/icebox
• Latest git Yosys is required to synthesise the demo design

Building

• Use CMake to generate the Makefiles (only needs to be done when CMakeLists.txt changes)
  • For a debug build, run cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug .
  • For a debug build with HX1K support only, run cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DICE40_HX1K_ONLY=1 .
  • For a release build, run cmake .
  • Add -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/your/install/prefix to use a different install prefix to the default /usr/local
• Use Make to run the build itself
  • For all targets, just run make
  • For just the iCE40 CLI binary, run make nextpnr-ice40
  • For just the iCE40 Python module, run make nextpnrpy_ice40
  • Using too many parallel jobs may lead to out-of-memory issues due to the significant memory needed to build the chipdbs
  • To install nextpnr, run make install

Running

• To run the CLI binary, just run ./nextpnr-ice40 (you should see command line help)
• To start the UI, run ./nextpnr-ice40 --gui
• The Python module is called nextpnrpy_ice40.so. To test it, run PYTHONPATH=. python3 python/python_mod_test.py
• Run yosys blinky.ys in ice40/ to synthesise the blinky design and produce blinky.json.
• To place-and-route the blinky using nextpnr, run ./nextpnr-ice40 --hx1k --json ice40/blinky.json --pcf ice40/blinky.pcf --asc blinky.asc

Notes

• All code is formatted using clang-format according to the style rules in .clang-format (LLVM based with increased indent widths and brace wraps after classes).
• To automatically format all source code, run make clangformat.