Author Topic: Anyone used Lattice ICE40 FPGAs ?  (Read 36418 times)

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Offline sporadic

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Re: Anyone used Lattice ICE40 FPGAs ?
« Reply #50 on: January 07, 2015, 08:11:20 pm »
I've been wanting to learn FPGAs for some time now, and the price of the iCE40 chips intrigued me.  High speed glue for multiplexing a few IO lines is what I'm looking at for my starter project.  I've downloaded iCEcube2, but I'm having a very hard time finding any tutorials on the toolset.  I've been going through the user's manual getting an example project going, but am having issues figuring out how to start from scratch. Simple newbie things like creating the constraint files.  I know I'm lacking some fundamental knowledge, but how do I create these files within the tools itself? Or are they supposed to be created externally and imported?
 

Offline Howardlong

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Re: Anyone used Lattice ICE40 FPGAs ?
« Reply #51 on: January 07, 2015, 11:52:44 pm »
Agreed, a step-by-step guide just to do a blinky would be nice. Surely it can't be that hard?
 

Offline mc

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Re: Anyone used Lattice ICE40 FPGAs ?
« Reply #52 on: January 10, 2015, 06:51:11 pm »
I've not even looked at the ice toolchain, however IMO tutorials and documentation is where Lattice fails.

I've got a MachX02 board, and I've pretty much given up with it, as tutorials are minimal (I ended up finding some random one via googling that at least got me flashing a light), and documentation seems to be non-existent.
When I get time, I'm going to get either an Altera or Xilinx board, as tutorials for them seem alot more plentiful, then I might venture back to Lattice.
 
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Offline sporadic

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Re: Anyone used Lattice ICE40 FPGAs ?
« Reply #53 on: January 12, 2015, 01:40:23 pm »
I've not even looked at the ice toolchain, however IMO tutorials and documentation is where Lattice fails.

I've got a MachX02 board, and I've pretty much given up with it, as tutorials are minimal (I ended up finding some random one via googling that at least got me flashing a light), and documentation seems to be non-existent.
When I get time, I'm going to get either an Altera or Xilinx board, as tutorials for them seem alot more plentiful, then I might venture back to Lattice.

This is the route I decided to take. Grabbed an iCEstick on my last Mouser order, but picked up one of those cheap (<$20) Cyclone II dev boards from eBay to get my feet wet. 
 


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