FPGA's 2025 Part II: Lattice/iCEcube2

Hello again, continuing on my quasi-annual attempt to get started with low cost Field Programmable Gate Arrays, or FPGA's. 

How will I do in 2025?

Last post I installed a Windows toolchain for Altera/Quartus; I read that offerings from Lattice Semiconductor are a bit more DIY/hobbyist friendly. Let's find out.

Nandland Go Board, sporting a Lattice FPGA chip

WHICH LATTICE-BASED DEVELOPMENT BOARD?

I already owned a couple of Lattice FPGA based boards: "TinyFPGA BX's",  hardware and their open source toolchain are covered in this previous post.

As far as I could tell BX boards were no longer being manufactured, also, I guessed that Lattice's software might be easier to get going vs. open source software I used to program the TinyFPGA's. 

After research: fingers pointed to Nandland Go Board as an affordable way to get started with Lattice FPGA's.....bought one!

TOOLCHAIN

The lower-end (read: less expensive) Lattice FPGA chips are programmed or "designed" using Lattice's iCEcube2 software. 

An Aside: Lattice almost removed itself from the DIY/student/hobbyist FPGA world forever (smart move? How much money do we spend on this stuff compared to these guys?) by raising license fees for IceCube2 from free to more than $470USB. 

Fortunately Lattice changed its mind, and iCEcube2 is available again using the five finger discount; we are back in business.

I followed the webpage here to get the toolchain going. Conclusion: Nandland's one-stop online resources (tutorials, purchasing, videos, more) made things much easier to get going versus Quartus Prime and Altera. Their "getting started" video and webpage (here and here) were invaluable; I went from nothing to blink in about 2 hours.

How I got iCEcube2 for free:

I had to create an account on the Lattice Semi page: here.

Then I emailed the Lattice Licensing dudes (lic_admn@latticesemi.com) with the subject "New iCEcube2 License Request" from my audiodiwhy email. I sent the email on Saturday. 

I was a bit surprised that the following Monday, yes, I got an email from Lattice Semi that had a serial number in it. 

With that, I went back to Lattice's website (the page here) to turn the serial number into a license (*.dat file). Lattice emailed the .dat file to me, I saved that on my Window 11 system's hard drive, then used it complete the installation of iCEcube2.

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Back to today's topic....

ICECUBES (2 of them) in YER TROUSERS

During the iCEcube2 installation I had to enter the MAC address of my windows system (start > run > cmd > ipconfig); everything else was straightforward.

iCEcube2 did not have a built in programmer. As per the Nandland tutorials, I had to install the Diamond Programmer Standalone (here).  Be sure to download the 50 odd MB Standalone programmer, not the 1GB+ Diamond software zip. You only need the former.

I downloaded and installed the Windows title:

You will need the "Diamond Programmer Standalone" to get your .bin files onto your FPGA board

I also downloaded the FTDI Windows driver for the Go Board, here. I installed the driver for Windows 11 using all defaults, a reboot wasn't necessary.

All in all--pretty easy.  

Next: a few screenshots that might prove helpful in 6 months when I forget all this.

When creating an iCEcube2 based design, the program will save your critical .bin file--the binary file needed to blow into the FPGA--to god-only-knows where. Wait, I know where! [project]\sbt\outputs\bitmap.  

The Diamond Programmer needs the changes in red above to work with the Go Board....

Then: "device properties" need to be set for the Go Board. Note--"Device: M25P10" did not match what is shown the Nandland blink project video, but the M25P10 setting worked.

Thankfully, you can save your programming configuration as an xcf file. That way you don't have to configure the standalone programmer every time you have a new project. 

Cool!

CODE

To test the toolchain I used the .v blink code from the Nanoland site.

module Switches_To_LEDs

(input i_Switch_1,

input i_Switch_2,

input i_Switch_3,

input i_Switch_4,

output o_LED_1,

output o_LED_2,

output o_LED_3,

output o_LED_4);

assign o_LED_1 = i_Switch_1;

assign o_LED_2 = i_Switch_2;

assign o_LED_3 = i_Switch_3;

assign o_LED_4 = i_Switch_4;

endmodule 

I uploaded it using the instructions from the "getting started" tutorial--here.  

It didn't work at first, but I ran through the steps a second time and viola:

BLINKORAMA?

I reached Newbie Nirvana: press SW1 through SW4, the damn thing blinked.

Boy Howdy!

What next? There are low-code/no code options, like Icestorm (here), and, maybe I can use AI so I don't have to learn Verilog. I also found an interesting video about using Logisim Evolution (previous LSE post is here) to generate code from schematics: click here.

But first I have to come up with a project for my nifty FPGA boards. 

Maybe some sort of all-FPGA Lunetta thingy?  

We will see. See ya next time!

FGPA's 2025 part I: Intel/Altera/Quartus

Hello there, it's a new year, and I am jumping back down the FPGA rabbit hole:

Tesaric DE10-LITE. The URL for the CD, on a sticker glued by the manufacturer to the board, 404's. Sorry.

I last worked with FPGA's a couple of years ago almost to the day (post here)

This time I wanted to see if I could figure out how to use an FPGA for accurate data acquisition (the frequency counter project/multiplier, for instance: here).  

I got out my tinyFPGA BX for this but soon found out it's listed on Digikey as "obsolete" and not currently for sale.... 

Hello? It's only a couple of years old but, whatever.

Digging into alternatives, wow, the FPGA market is figure 8 trailer racing: 

• AMD buys Xilinx, renames the product line, and ditches Xilinx's low end offerings--the ones low cost FPGA's DIYers would use right? Yep, gone! Sorry....
• Intel buys Altera, renames the division , and ditches Altera's low end offerings. Again that means some of the FPGA chips DIY'ers might use are no longer supported. Sorry.
• And oh yeh--due to financial issues Intel spins Altera off as its own company again. Sorry.
• Lattice ups the price of their FPGA programming software from free to $471 dollars. Sorry.
• A bunch of hobbyists beg Lattice to change their minds, so, incredibly, they make it free again.
• Microchip merges with Microsemi....
• Oh, never mind. 

In a nutshell: the FPGA landscape apparently changes more quickly and more often than my chonies.

Older, lower density FPGA's are being phased out:

I bought this Altera Cyclone II development board a few years ago for next to nothing, but recently discovered that the current Quartus programming IDE no longer supports it. Sorry. I might be able to get an older version of Quartus working on an Windows 7 VM and revitalize this dinosaur? 

Regardless, as a birthday gift to myself, or maybe because I love punishment, I bought a few newer FPGA offerings and will try to get their toolchains going in the next few posts.  

This time it's Intel, Altera, and Quartus. But first.....

PCBWAY--THIS BLOG'S HUMBLE SPONSOR

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A QUARTUS LOW?

Quartus Prime Lite Edition is the free offering from Intel (Wait--Altera? or these guys?) you can use to program supported Intel FPGA's.

As far as I can tell, Quartus Prime Lite is the same software with the same features as the >$2k USD  licensed versions but only supports Altera's current line of lower density FPGA's. 

Good enough for what we do? Probably, yes!

I downloaded and ran the 28MB SFX installer for Windows: here. Some how-to videos such as the one here demonstrated downloading tricks needed to get Quartus Prime Lite to work for free, but nope, the single file linked above pulled in necessary files and the install was simple. 

Best of all--no license was needed! 

Warning: As mentioned above, the FPGA scene is always changing fast, so who knows when the links in this post will break....if you want software so you can program your FPGA, get it soon!

For hardware: after some research, a good bang-for-the-buck option supported by the current version of Quartus Prime Lite is the Tesaric DE10-LITE.  

 

There are less expensive Altera options, but for now, I wanted to make sure I could get the toolchain to work and a lot of documentation pointed to Tesaric.

The video I followed to get the toolchain up and running is Olawale Akinwale's offering here. 

This was a helpful video, but Olawale showed me how to do something wrong before showing me how to do it right--educational, but, time consuming. You might want to watch the whole video before attempting to get your FPGA board working.

For Verilog code I used the same .v file the content he used:

module lab1_1 (SW,LEDR);

input [9:0] SW; //slide switches

output [9:0] LEDR; // red LEDs

assign LEDR = SW;

endmodule

A few things not mentioned in the video:

• The USB-Blaster driver did not install correctly on my windows 11 system during the initial Quartus install. 

To get that going I ran the DPINST.exe program that was installed along with Quartus. On my Windows PC I found the app here: C:\intelFPGA_lite\23.1std\quartus\drivers.  

I found other videos and forum posts saying to fix this issue use Windows device manager--but for Windows 11, no, that didn't work.  Running DPinst.exe fixed things; I can now see "USB-Blaster [USB-0] in the "hardware setup" dialog.

• To blow your verilog code get into the firmware of the dev board--and not have your work wiped out each power cycle--the Programmer UI needs to be set to run the .pof file and "program/configure" needs to be set as you see here:

Beyond that the video was spot-on.

After uploading to the FPGA deb board, and solving the issues above, each slide switch turned on or off its corresponding LED. 

It worked! Cool!!! 

str = 'F' + str.Substring(1);

Say what you will about Intel, Quartus is a super powerful piece of software.

Next, I found out that you can do low code/no code Verilog development using its "schematic" feature. Video is here.  

Using that I drew up a few AND gates and converted the schemo into verilog code:

"File" > "Create/Update" > "Create HDL Design File for Current File" (I had to have the .v overarching project open for this export to work).

I got this:

module lab1_3(

SW0,

SW1,

SW2,

SW3,

LEDR0

);

input wire SW0;

input wire SW1;

input wire SW2;

input wire SW3;

output wire LEDR0;

wire SYNTHESIZED_WIRE_0;

wire SYNTHESIZED_WIRE_1;

assign SYNTHESIZED_WIRE_0 = SW0 & SW1;

assign SYNTHESIZED_WIRE_1 = SW2 & SW3;

assign LEDR0 = SYNTHESIZED_WIRE_0 & SYNTHESIZED_WIRE_1;

endmodule

QUARTOUTTRO?  QUARTUSTRO?  QUARTOJUMBO? 

Between these features and AI maybe I can do useful FPGA coding without having to learn a ton of Verilog.....

Obviously I have a long way to go here, but, figuring out this new toolchain was a lot of fun.

Next up I am going to look into current offerings for Lattice Semiconductor--thankfully, they are still around, haven't been recently acquired by a wig company, and in that they have some lower-end offerings and seem to care about the hobbyist and semi-pro community, might be a better fit for DiWHY.  Update: done, Lattice FPGA hardware and a free toolchain work--post is here.

We will see.