Maverick

Abstract

Traditionally, an FPGA vendor's own set of computer-aided design (CAD) tools are used to generate circuits for a given vendor's FPGAs. However, numerous non-vendor CAD tools have been introduced to supplement the vendor-provided tools, allowing novel ideas to be explored and a variety of technical challenges to be addressed. This poster presents Maverick, a stand-alone CAD flow for compiling Verilog to bitstreams for Xilinx 7-Series devices. After an initial configuration design is created with Xilinx's Vivado partial reconfiguration (PR) flow to define a static design and a PR region, the Maverick flow can then compile and map Verilog design into that PR region - without the use of vendor tools. The Maverick flow combines two existing open source projects (Yosys and Project X-Ray) with our own RapidSmith2 tools to form an end-to-end compilation flow. It uses Yosys (synthesis), RapidSmith2 (pack, place, route), and the Project X-Ray tools (bitstream generation), taking Verilog designs as input and generating partial bitstreams as output. Several modifications were made to these existing tools and completely new tools were created, including a new RapidSmith2-based router, as a part of this work. This poster details these CAD steps and shows the results of the CAD flow running on a PYNQ-Z1 SoC's ARM processor to compile a set of HDL designs to partial bitstreams. The resulting bitstreams were configured onto the PYNQ-Z1's FPGA fabric, demonstrating the feasibility of a single-chip system which can both compile HDL designs to bitstreams and then configure them onto its own fabric.