Throwing Verilog Users a Bone with an Open Source FPGA Dev Board

LogicBone is a Lattice ECP5-based FPGA dev board with 8Gb RAM and BeagleBone Black Cape compatibility.

Ish Ot Jr.
4 years agoFPGAs

Self-professed "hardware hack by night" oskirby couldn't find the FPGA dev board they wanted...so what did they do? Designed it themselves! The LogicBone is a Lattice ECP5-based FPGA dev board with a whopping 8Gb of DDR3L RAM onboard. The physical characteristics of the board are based on the popular BeagleBone Black, with Cape-compatible 2x46 pin headers.

The primary goal of the project is to ensure compatibility with open source FPGA synthesis tools such as yosys, NextPNR and SymbiFlow, while enabling larger logic designs which require fast I/O. While the project is still a work in progress, the ultimate goal is to run Linux with networking on a RISC-V-based soft core.

Features at a glance:

  • Lattice ECP5 (LFE5UM5G-45F-8BG381C) with 44k LUTs and 351 kbits of distributed RAM
  • Beaglebone Black mechanical and header compatibility
  • 8Gb on-board DDR3L RAM
  • KSZ9031 Gigabit Ethernet PHY
  • microSD card slot
  • USB-C upstream and downstream facing ports
  • M.2 E-Keyed expansion interface with GPIO, UART, SDIO and PCM interfaces

Prototypes are currently in testing, and since the project is open source, schematics, a bootloader, a bootable Linux fork, test projects, and more are available on oskirby's GitHub!

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