Open-source accelerator platform for large FPGAs

Affordable Kintex-7 FPGA cards with DDR3 and PCIe have recently become accessible to hobbyists, researchers and small companies, but the open-source tooling and gateware ecosystem has not yet caught up. This project bridges that gap by delivering an end-to-end open platform: a Raspberry Pi with PCIe root port will be used for easy bring-up and remote access, while a fully open PCIe endpoint and DMA engine drives high-speed host-device transfers, with an open-source uberDDR3 memory controller for data storage. Users will be able to run large FPGA designs, integrate high-bandwidth memory and PCIe interfaces, and reuse the PCIe/DMA infrastructure in their own projects, all without vendor tools. The project also ports the ZTAchip accelerator to Kintex 7 with openXC7 and prepares real-world AI demos such as video object detection and local LLM inference. This gives users a practical, low-cost entry point into hardware acceleration, enabling experimentation with custom architectures, RISC-V extensions, SDR pipelines, image processing or general compute offloading. Improvements to openXC7, nextpnr and scalePnR benefit the wider community, making large-device timing closure and GTX transceivers more accessible. Overall, this work expands the possibilities for developers who want high-performance FPGA capabilities without proprietary toolchains.