YosysHQ Celebrates a Major Milestone for Open Source FPGA Tooling: Support for a 500k LUT Space Chip
NanoXplore's NG-Ultra space-grade FPGA, with more than 500,000 look-up tables, is now supported in a Yosys-nextpnr workflow.
YosysHQ, the team behind the Yosys open source synthesis framework, nextpnr place-and-route tool, and a variety of related electronic design automation tools, is celebrating a major milestone: the successful use of an open source FPGA toolchain for the largest device yet, a space-grade chip boasting more than 500,000 look-up tables (LUTs).
"In what was a major achievement in open source FPGA development, we have now added support for the largest FPGA so far supported by open source tooling," the YosysHQ team explains. "500,000 LUTs! In November 2024 we successfully concluded the European Space Agency [ESA] funded project in collaboration with NanoXplore, known for their space rated FPGAs."
The project, part of the ESA's Discovery program, focused on adding support for NanoXplore's NG-Ultra FPGA to nextpnr, a place-and-route tool which lays out a synthesized design on the FPGA itself. Available in a system-on-chip design pairing Arm Cortex-R52 cores with an FPGA fabric boasting 5,36,928 LUT-4s, allowing for complex creations, the NG-Ultra is powerful and radiation-hardened for use in orbital and deep-space missions — but had previously only been accessible using proprietary, closed-source tooling.
"The integration of nextpnr with NG-Ultra represents a major achievement in open-source FPGA development, as it is by far the largest FPGA supported by open-source tooling," YosysHQ explains. "The tool provides developers with a flexible and customizable option for designing for NG-Ultra FPGAs, offering increased reliability through the ability to cross-verify designs using two independent tools. Although there are challenges ahead in terms of optimising performance and expanding tool functionality, this project has laid the foundation for ongoing innovation and collaboration in the FPGA development community."
More information on the project is available on the ESA's Nebula Public Library; nextpnr is available on GitHub under the permissive ISC license, with Yosys available in a separate repository under the same license. Details on the NG-Ultra FPGA are available on the NanoXplore website.
Main article image courtesy of the European Space Agency (ESA).