[J-core] Happy new year.

[Daniel G.]

On Jan 2 2021, Rob Landley wrote:

> We're still here, working on stuff. Sorry for the radio silence, there 
> are actual marketing people who in theory they were going to redo the 
> j-core website, and in practice have been busy with B2B stuff, so I 
> should take this over again and start updating the website (with my sad 
> "editing raw html in vi" skills) and posting updates here.
>
> The xilinx proprietary toolchain continues to be a pain in the neck, but 
> lattice has made some larger (ecp5) FPGAs you can fit a reasonable SOC 
> in. (The downside is they're DOG SLOW, like clocking 1/4 the speed of 
> spartan 6.) Still, if somebody's interested in a port to something like
>
>  
> https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2334524.m570.l1313&_nkw=ICEBreaker+ice40&_sacat=0&LH_TitleDesc=0&_osacat=0&_odkw=ICEBreaker
>
> We can probably get j-core running on that, AND it should work with the 
> fully open toolchain.
>
> (Speaking of which, I need to redo https://github.com/landley/yogh 
> because https://github.com/YosysHQ/yosys/commit/a652430c711b made things 
> potentially more integrated. I also need to look at 
> https://tomverbeure.github.io/2020/08/08/CXXRTL-the-New-Yosys-Simulation-Backend.html 
> and https://github.com/rlee287/ghdl-yosys-plugin/tree/vhdl_backend/src)
>
> In other news, I hate to mention anything that hasn't been released yet 
> but we've gotten the darn clearances to release J32, and are working to 
> get that up on github. (It's a branch off of an older SOC version so 
> there's some porting and disentangling to do, but work on that is 
> actually happening rather than planned. Yay. Thanks to Jeff Garzik for 
> getting that unstuck.)
>
> We've done a bunch of other things that sadly aren't useful here yet. 
> (For example, we did a USB 2.0 CDC-ECM ethernet implementation, which has 
> been working fine since november, but it needs a USB phy chip wired up to 
> the SOC and we only made 10 instances of that expansion board...
>
> Anyway, just wanted to say we're still at it. Sorry we haven't been very 
> communicative, but 2020 didn't leave any of us with a lot of spare 
> energy. I'll try to do better...
>
>Rob
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Hello and Happy new year,

Can you confirm me that synthesis of the SoC for fpgas other than Xilinx is 
currently not possible due to the usage of unisim.vcomponents for some 
parts of the SoC.

-- 
Kind regards,
Daniel G.