Alchitry Cu with Spinal HDL template

A template project to use Spinal HDL with an Alchitry Cu (With support for the Alchitry IO board)

Requirements

You will need:

• A linux machine (tested on Manjaro)
• An ICE40 open toolchain:
  • Yosys
  • Nextpnr
  • Icestom (icepack + iceprog)
• Java JDK 8+ (tested on 13.0.1)
• Scala
• sbt
• The make make

Also, optionally:

• If you have problems with the last step (upload), it can be fixed by using apio to install the FTDI drivers

Installation

• Install the toolchain:

git clone https://github.com/cliffordwolf/icestorm.git icestorm
cd icestorm
make -j$(nproc)
sudo make install
cd ..

git clone https://github.com/YosysHQ/nextpnr.git nextpnr
cd nextpnr
cmake -DARCH=ice40 .
make -j$(nproc)
sudo make install
cd ..

git clone https://github.com/YosysHQ/yosys.git yosys
cd yosys
make -j$(nproc)
sudo make install
cd ..

• Install Java and Scala (I used yay on Archlinux)
• Clone this repo

Programming the FPGA

By default, the code is in src/main/scala/mylib/MyTopLevel.scala. You can edit it however you want using a text editor

Then we need to compile it to verilog. To do so, there are two ways:

• Fast way: run the command sbt, keep it open, and type run everytime you want to recompile
• Slow way: make verilog (it restarts sbt everytime, which is slow)

We then need to generate a .bin file. To do so, run make icestorm

Finally, we need to flash the FPGA. To do so, run make upload

TIPS:

• make update combines make icestorm and make upload
• make all combines make verilog, make icestorm and make upload