35. Chaos Communication Congress

The SymbiFlow project aims to be the "GCC of FPGAs" - a fully open source toolchain supporting, multiple FPGAs from different vendors. Allowing compilation from Verilog to bitstream without touching vendor provided tools, it includes support for large modern FPGAs like the Lattice ECP5 and Xilinx 7 series. These FPGAs can be used for things previously out of reach of FOSS tools, things like high resolution video and many gigabit networking. We have also documented the FPGA bitstreams to allow other new tools and a process for replicating this effort on new types of FPGAs!

This talk will present a historical narrative of the background behind how the NeTV + Milkymist inspire the HDMI2USB then helped the NeTV2 projects and how they all became interlinked through events like Congress! From the study of this history, we will attempt to distill a few core lessons learned that can hopefully be applied to other open hardware projects.