FABulous Demo SoC

Until recently, integrated circuits have largely been treated as blackboxes in the realm of trustworthy hardware. FPGAs, devices that can be programmed by the user to implement arbitrary logic functionality, help to open up this realm. But even with open source software stacks such as Yosys and nextpnr compiling for them, FPGAs themselves are still proprietary silicon. Using the FABulous framework and a wide range of other open IP, we are building a FPGA SoC (combination of a FPGA programmable logic fabric and a Linux-capable RISC-V CPU) that is both itself open source and built with open tools, and also supports the open FPGA toolchain. to develop it. Simplicity is a key design decision throughout, so we can use our work to explain how modern computing systems work without the complexity of commercial platforms.