FPGA Tools
These are some miscellaneous hacks and scripts related to FPGA programming / design. There aren’t major software projects, just bits of code developed for the wireless emulator project.
Xilinx ISE build files
Use SCons to compile FPGA designs in Xilinx ISE. This has limited support for extracting dependencies and build settings from .xise project files. github page
Emacs major mode for Xilinx UCF (User Constraint File) files.
Provides syntax highlighting for a reasonable subset of UCF statements. github page
Clock parameter calculation
Use an optimization solver (GAMS+BARON) to find appropriate frequency parameters for Analog Devices AD9510 clock distribution chips. github page
Simple SPI core
Verilog code for a Serial Peripheral Interface(SPI) master. Based on simple_spi from OpenCores. github page
Software “logic analyzer” for SPI
Look at SPI protocol messages in Value Change Dump (VCD) format files. Includes a higher-layer decoder for Analog Devices’ AD9510 configuration messages. This project includes a fairly general-purpose VCD file parser/interpreter (with ANTLR grammar), which may be of broader interest. github page
Free Software licenses
How should free (“libre”, “open source”) hardware description language designs be licensed? GNU-style software licenses don’t cover all the ways HDL code is used, but hardware licenses (1, 2) are further off the mark. What would be better? Contribute to the discussion on the Free HDL License wiki.