Using the iCEBreaker with an Open Source FPGA toolchain on OS X

iCEBreaker

iCEBreaker

When I used FPGAs in the past, e.g. for my LED Display, I was using Xilinx FPGAs with their proprietary software which unfortunately runs only under Windows or Linux. This was very inconvenient and in addition the software was slow as hell.

Fortunately a new era has begun: Open-Source FPGA toolchains! It was started some time back by Clifford Wolf, who first wrote a synthesis tool called Yosys and later reverse-engineered the bitstream format for Lattice iCE-40 FPGAs. Recently a new place-and-route tool called nextpnr was developed as well. Continue reading