Monthly Archives: August 2015

First steps with a Lattice iCE40 FPGA

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I’ve just been doing some work with the iCE40 series of FPGAs from Lattice Semiconductor. They’re small FPGAs, with up to 7680 gates, and they’re very low-power, which is nice for mobile applications. From what I can gather, Lattice acquired the designs when they bought a company called SiliconBlue in 2011. I’ve been used to using the Lattice Diamond software with their other chips, but the iCE40 chips aren’t supported by Diamond. Instead, they get their own software called iCEcube2. It’s a bit of a pain to use and not very well documented. I’ve just been through the process of starting a project and getting a very basic design working, and I’m writing about it here in case someone else finds it useful.

Img_0602

The iCEcube2 software looks convincingly like an IDE, but it isn’t, really. It doesn’t even seem to have a way of creating new source code files, and the order in which some things have to be done is not at all obvious. I think iCEcube2 is really designed for taking existing designs and implementing them on the Lattice iCE40 chips. While the software is a complete dog’s breakfast, it does have the key advantage of being free. You do need to create a node-locked licence for it using their licencing page.

iCEcube-blank

To start an empty project, double click Project -> New Project. Select the chip you’re going to use. This creates a folder with the title of the project, containing:

  • <project>_sbt.project
  • <project>_syn.prj
  • folder <project>_Implmnt, containing folder sbt, containing folders constraint, log and outputs. All are empty apart from iceCube0.log in log folder.

Now you can add your source files. If you click on ‘Synthesis Tool’, then an ‘Add Synthesis Files’ menu item appears, but clicking on this doesn’t do anything useful. You have to right-click on ‘Add Synthesis Files’ and select ‘Add Files…’ from the pop-up menu. Go figure. I used a very simple VHDL source file:

LIBRARY ieee;
USE ieee.std_logic_1164.ALL;

ENTITY test IS
 PORT
 (
 d: in std_logic;
 q: out std_logic;
 qn: out std_logic
 );
END test;

ARCHITECTURE rtl OF test IS
BEGIN

 q <= d;
 qn <= not d;
 
END rtl;

At this point I’d expect to be able to allocate signal names (d, q and qn, in this case) to pins on the device package. But you can’t do that yet in the wonderful world of iCEcube2. All the buttons on the toolbar are greyed out. The way to proceed is to double click ‘Run Synplify Pro Synthesis’. Hopefully your code will compile without errors, and lots of files get created.

The project folder now contains:

  • stdout.log and stdout.log.bak
  • synlog.tcl
  • loads of stuff under <project>_Implmnt

Two new files appear in the project under ‘P&R Flow’: <project>.edf and <project>.scf.

Now double-click ‘Run P&R’. The design will get placed and routed, and a bitmap gets generated for programming the chip.

At this point the toolbar buttons for timing constraints, pin constraints, floor planner, package view, power estimator and timing analysis become active. Hurrah! Now you can change your pin constraints.

iCEcube-toolbar-enabled

Click on ‘Pin Constraints Editor’, the fourth icon from the left. Put in the pin locations for the signals you want. Make sure you click the ‘locked’ checkboxes on the left hand side, otherwise the place and route process is likely to move them. Press ctrl-S to save. The constraints get saved in <project>_Implmnt\sbt\constraint\<top design file>_pcf_sbt.pcf. You will then get asked to add the file to the project. Say yes.

If you’re using source control, it’s a good idea to add this file to it. I’m not so sure about all the other junk that iCEcube generates.

Now double-click ‘Run P&R’ again and the new bitmap file will be generated, using your pin constraints.

Programming an actual chip (or at least its SPI Flash ROM) needs the Diamond Programming tool, which comes as part of the Lattice Diamond software and *not* as part of iCEcube2. That’s just another couple of gigabytes to download, and another licence (free) to acquire, so it’s a pain, but it does work.

Orange Internet and port forwarding, continued

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A long time ago, I wrote an article about how I worked around the lack of NAT loopback support on the Orange LiveBox broadband router. At the time, it was a pain to get everything working right. Having just moved house, we made the sensible decision to stay with the same broadband provider, in order to avoid having to re-invent or at least re-configure all this stuff.

Well, it turned out not to be as easy as that. Nothing ever is, it seems. The new Orange broadband service comes with a ‘FunBox‘ instead of a ‘LiveBox’. Fun? Who said? Not in my experience. The web interface to the box looks comfortingly similar to the old LiveBox, so I thought it would work the same way. No chance.

funbox2

What’s the problem I’m trying to solve here? Well, I have a little SheevaPlug which hosts some services I need to use from various locations when I’m working. Yes, I know I should put those services ‘in the cloud’, but that would involve both paying money and solving a whole load of other problems. For years and years, I’ve simply had a port forwarding rule set up on my home broadband router so that the SheevaPlug is accessible from the internet. A little touch of dynamic DNS courtesy of dyn.com and it’s all worked fine.

Fast forward to 2015. I tried to recreate the setup I’d always used, but with the FunBox (hah!). The old setup went like this:

home_net_old

  • the broadband router just does the usual NAT routing and behaves as a dumb wi-fi access point. It has a port forwarding rule set up to forward port 22 (ssh) to the SheevaPlug
  • the SheevaPlug hosts my ssh server, and provides the DHCP and DNS services to everything on the network, so I get proper local hostname lookups, easy-to-manage IP addresses, and can solve the NAT loopback problem.

That’s it. I tried to set up the FunBox the same way. What could possibly go wrong?

I boldly switched off the DHCP and DNS servers in the FunBox and switched over to using the ones on my SheevaPlug. Everything seemed to work fine, except…the TV. Yes, the TV decoder is connected to the FunBox via Ethernet, so the whole shebang comes down the wire. No aerial required. Trouble is, the FunBox seems to need to set up the TV decoder by DHCP otherwise it doesn’t know it’s there, so you get no telly. Oh well, I’ll use the DHCP server in the FunBox and put up with the inconvenience.

Even that doesn’t work out. In order to solve the NAT loopback problem, which the miserable FunBox suffers from just like the LiveBox, I need to run my local DNS server. Except that the brain-dead FunBox won’t let you change the DNS settings on its built-in DHCP server. How annoying is that?

OK, accept that NAT loopback will remain a problem. Maybe I’ll find another way round that. Now for the showstopper: the blessed FunBox refuses to forward port 22. It will forward every other port under the sun, but not 22. The web configuration interface just won’t accept the setting: it ignores it. Doesn’t even give an error message. You’re just not having it. Oh well, maybe I have to expose my ssh server on a different port and put up with changing all the gazillion clients which know about it. Except I’ve still got the loopback problem. This is getting unpleasant.

Before tearing out what little remained of my hair by this point, I slept on the problem and had a brainwave. The FunBox supports a ‘DMZ’ feature, in which it’ll forward all incoming internet traffic to a particular IP address on the LAN. I tried it, experimentally sending all internet traffic to the poor, naked SheevaPlug, and it worked! At last, sweet relief: something which does what it says on the tin.

Clearly exposing the server in all its complacent insecurity to the internet isn’t a good idea. I needed to put a firewall in the way. A rummage in the cupboard produced a spare Raspberry Pi and a USB to Ethernet adapter. I programmed OpenWRT on to an SD card and booted up. It turned out to be easier to configure it through the command line than with the web interface, LuCI, which isn’t exactly finished yet. Some fiddling later and I’d managed to disable its DHCP and DNS features and enable incoming connections only on port 22.

Adding the firewall had another bonus: it meant I could re-enable my DNS and DHCP servers and let them look after the LAN without the wretched FunBox knowing anything about it. It just has to live a simple life, looking after the telly and the firewall. I disabled its built-in Wi-fi access point and added an ageing Linksys WAP54G running DD-WRT software after the firewall. Lovely.

home_net_new

There is one fly in the ointment: the Raspberry Pi turns out to make a rubbish router. Our 30 megabit internet connection is reduced to 3 megabits on its way through the Pi. I don’t know if it’s something to do with my configuration, or the release of OpenWRT (15.05-rc3) I’m using. When I’ve unpacked enough boxes to find another router, I’ll try that.