Zero ASIC releases Wildebeest, the highest performance FPGA synthesis tool

https://www.zeroasic.com/blog/wildebeest-launch

by stefanpie • 10 months ago

187 54 10 months ago

dlcarrier2• 10 months ago

The best part of open-source synthesis tools is that they don't require absurdly bloated development environments. The only thing I've encountered that's worse is Android Studio.

Getting more efficient output is a nice bonus.

SuperMouse2• 10 months ago

Most FPGA vendor tools can be used from the console. But they are very fat.

polalavik• 10 months ago

I know of a few vendor tools whose application size is measured in the multi-hundred of GBs

st_goliath2• 10 months ago

... don't require absurdly bloated development environments.

Outside hobbies, I've been mostly away from this field for little over a decade by now. Is it still that bad? I remember back then, every single professional electronics engineer that I met had this die hard belief that this was simply how things work:

You want to use DerpSemi micro controllers? You must install DerpStudio '98! Not the later 2005 version tough, that has some major UI bugs. You want to program a HerpSoft PLC? You need EasyHerpes IDE! What, command line toolchain? Text editor? You must be completely insane!

It's been somewhat of a personal fight against windmills for me back then. That, plus suggesting that we are actually developing software and the C/Assembly/VHDL maybe shouldn't be an undocumented, tested-only-once pile of spaghetti based off a circuit diagram inside one guys head (and no, a 50 line comment block with a German transcription of the code below is not documentation).

robinsonb53• 10 months ago

One thing I will say in favour of the Gowin IDE - it does seem to be much more lightweight than the larger vendors' tools. For smaller designs it will often go from zero to bitstream in less time than Quartus or Vivado would have taken to even start synthesizing.

Ygg2• 10 months ago

and no, a 50 line comment block with a German transcription of the code below is not documentation

You had it good back then. Now it's a one-line comment in Chinese. Line is 300 characters wide. /Yorkshire men skit.

wucke13• 10 months ago

I have dedicated a large chunk of my (arguably short) professional career on improving upon this, mostly in the safety critical software domain. What was your experience back then, what made you leave ultimately, and what do you do now?

ACCount37• 10 months ago

It's much better in microcontrollers. Almost everything can now be handled with VSCode and some open source compiler toolchains.

PLCs and FPGAs are still pretty damn bad though.

Aurornis• 10 months ago

It's not that the official tools are the only way to work with parts.

It's that they're the only vendor supported method of working with the parts. If you build your product with an unsupported toolset and something doesn't work, you need to be prepared to reproduce the issue in the vendor support toolchain if you want support.

People coming from desktop and mobile development roll their eyes at this because they aren't coming across bugs in their x86-64 process or M1 Silicon that haven't already been patched over by some combination of microcode, the OS, and the toolchain. Everything works as expected.

Not so in the world of embedded. On modern complex systems, vendor involvement can be a critical part of the development process. Many of the products you have in your house like your router, Wifi gear, and IoT devices were probably co-developed to some degree with the hardware vendor. Starting with the vendor-provided reference design gets you to market much faster, even though you often could forge your own path with a separate toolchain and start from scratch.

It's still this way even in MCU development. You can go out and develop something like an STM32 system completely without STMicro's tools, but it's much easier to start the project in STMicro's tools and copy over the parts you need for setting up everything from clocks to peripherals, then to maintain a skeleton project in the official tools in case your separate toolchain starts acting funny.

f1shy• 10 months ago

Is it still that bad?

IMHO yes, if not worse.

Working now with some advanced devices from Xilinx (using very expensive top-line SoC. If you change version of the Vivado tools, you have to basically start again from 0 your project. Is a complicated mess because of matching of the OS in the ARM controller and the FPGA part…

dreamcompiler• 10 months ago

It's that bad. FPGA designers on my team would routinely start a Vivado job and come back 8 hours later (because that's how long it typically took) and discover Vivado had crashed.

Vivado is expensive, bloated, buggy garbage.

adwn4• 10 months ago

As much as I wish this would come true, there's little chance for a full, end-to-end open source toolchain for Xilinx or Altera FPGAs that's competitive with the vendor tools. The reason for this is that there's no publicly available documentation of the signal routing configuration or the bitstream format, which are required for the final two steps in the chain. I don't see the two market leaders releasing this information anytime soon, and reverse engineering it from the data files is probably rather difficult.

The synthesis discussed in the linked page is one of the earliest steps, and from the point of view of open source implementations, the simplest one, because all necessary information is freely available.

aappleby• 10 months ago

"there's no publicly available documentation of the signal routing configuration or the bitstream format"

Both of things either have already been reverse-engineered, or are in the process of being reverse-engineered.

dlcarrier2• 10 months ago

They seem to be pushing in that direction. Here's Altera's latest: https://github.com/OFS

tverbeure2• 10 months ago

The installation can be around 100GB, which is a lot, but you have to distinguish the build part from the IDE. I hardly ever use the IDE and just use a Makefile.

The open source tools still lack too many features to be useful for non-hobby development.

adwn4• 10 months ago

I don't understand the table under Benchmark Results. To compare the quality of two toolchains, the device architecture needs to be the same. "LUT6" vs "LUT4" doesn't cut it, there's much, much more to the architecture of an FPGA than the width of its look-up tables [1], and even for the "LUT6" category, I see four different devices.

[1] Consequently, there's more to FPGA synthesis than LUT mapping, so take the reported results with a huge grain of salt.

tux3• 10 months ago

They seem to be making their own eFPGA architecture, so there's no vendor tool to compare against for their primary purpose.

The closest you'll get is xc7 (Xilinx) vs vendor, one of which is surely Xilinx 7. But the Yosys xc7 support is limited and not the best supported, so it's not a great comparison either.

imtringued• 10 months ago

Not just that, their device "z1060" doesn't exist outside this blog post. We literally don't know what it is.

adapteva4• 10 months ago

Documentation can be found in two places. What else do you need to know?

https://github.com/siliconcompiler/logiklib/tree/main/logikl...

https://github.com/zeroasiccorp/wildebeest/tree/main/archite...

adapteva4• 10 months ago

Yeah, this was a big dilemman You can't compare two different compilers for two different hw targets. That would be like benchmarking GCC compiling to ARM with LLVM compiling to x86.

Thierry's synthesis scripts are really very clever, and the go way beyond our Platypus FPGA arch. We are realistic that until we have seilicon nobody cares about our arch. Releasing the work as open source, we think someone should adapt the code for all of the other targes I Yosys (xilinx, lattice...etc) so that everyone can benefit.

We contribute a lot of code to open source, but as an FPGA vendor we are not going to spend time/money optimizing compilers for our competitors:-)

rowanG0775• 10 months ago

This is not a separate synthesis tool. This is just a yosys plugin and only works for their own FPGAs. Kind of leaves a bad taste in my mount that they choose to advertise this as their own synthesis tool when it isn't. I'm curious why they didn't work together with upstream.

Also looking to their full stack it seem they use VPR/VTR instead of nextpnr for routing. That seems like a backwards choice.

elsjaako2• 10 months ago

When you release something as open source, a third party grabbing it and releasing it is explicitly something that can be done.

I can't speak for them, so I'm not sure, but I feel like new FPGA suppliers coming around having open source tooling being the default is something that the authors of Yosys would like.

Zero ASIC even credited the original authors in the press release and released the source code, which they didn't need to do. If you release your code under a permissive license, like Yosys did, a company taking it and selling a closed source version of it is something you are allowing. If that's not something you want, choose a different license.

rowanG0775• 10 months ago

There is obviously a difference between legality and what I would consider good behavior. I didn't say what they are doing is illegal. I just said it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

In essence this is something like 99% yosys + 1% their own sauce. Yet they market it as 99% their own sauce + 1% yosys.

boatfloatgoat• 10 months ago

will a smaller synthesis LUTs/logic depth result translate into smaller Map/P&R and higher fMax or not necessarily?

celegans25• 10 months ago

Often but not always. For most newer FPGAs, routing is the main source of delay on the critical path, not logic. So if the synthesis tool lowers the logic depth, but does so in a way that increases the distance the signal must travel on the chip, it likely won't help FMax.

This can be caused by increased logic usage, if the synthesis tool must create significantly more LUTs to reduce the critical path. This may make it harder to place the logic on the critical path close together, increasing the routing delay.

Additionally, if the synthesis tool replaces something with a dedicated routing path (most FPGAs have dedicated routing for carries, some may have dedicated routing for local connections in a CLB or between CLBs). These dedicated routing connections usually have a lower delay than the general purpose routing network, potentially increasing delay

The figures they have listed look promising though, they're lower or comparable to the commercial tools in terms of resource usage, with lower or comparable logic depths. They do however not have support for things like carry chains, which may potentially make some things like adders slower than the other tools.

IshKebab• 10 months ago

When I looked into Yosys it very much seemed like a tool from the 80s that you pretty much had to be a Yosys developer to use. It still uses TCL scripting (which I know is standard in EDA but it shouldn't be).

https://github.com/YosysHQ/yosys?tab=readme-ov-file#getting-...

I wish we had a modern easy-to-use solution.

tverbeure2• 10 months ago

Yosys supports Python scripting.

I expect my synthesis tools to consume text and output a netlist and to be able to do that in regression with a Makefile. Is that eighties? Synopsys DC does it, so does Vivado and Quartus and any other synthesis tool, including Yosys.

kragen• 10 months ago

This sounds exciting, and the press release does a great job of explaining why.

For anyone else who was wondering, it says it's under the Apache 2.0 license: https://github.com/zeroasiccorp/wildebeest?tab=Apache-2.0-1-...

I didn't realize that Xilinx xc7 synthesis was officially a feature of Yosys already!

Dropping the logic depth for picorv32 on LUT6s from 17 to 6 seems like it will double the achievable frequency or more. It's especially impressive that this beats the vendor tools—but it's unclear to me if this is an apples-to-apples comparison.

F3nd0• 10 months ago

Not to be confused with GNU, the free operating system.

Zero ASIC releases Wildebeest, the highest performance FPGA synthesis tool

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