Programming the Alchitry Au FPGA

It is crucial that you start familiarising yourself with coding the FPGA right away after you obtain the kit. Failure to do so will result in inevitable sufferings towards the end of the semester. This is unlike any programming subjects that you have learned in previous terms.

<aside> 📺 We are using Lucid, a language that Alchitry developed to make programming FPGA easier. We will be using Alchitry Lab IDE to program our FPGAs. You can mix Verilog and Lucid because the latter is transpiled into Verilog anyway before we pass it to Vivado to compile into binary to be loaded to our FPGA.

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Software to install: (see steps below)

1. Vivado ML Edition - 2023.2 or Vivado HLx (2020.2),
2. Alchitry Lab IDE (1.2.7),
3. Latest Java Development Kit

Total space required: ~60GB (excluding OS)

• Start cleaning up your devices if you don’t have enough space, and yes, you can install it on your desktop at home (you need this only for doing 1D project outside of school hours).

Supported OS: Windows, Linux x86

• macOS (Intel only) ****users need to Bootcamp or use a VM
• Bootcamp:
  • Partition at least 70-80 GB
  • 20-25GB for Windows OS, the rest for Vivado
  • Use Bootcamp to perform dual boot conveniently, but first ensure that you have updated your OS to Catalina or above, because Apple has a major Boot Camp Assistant update there.
  • It is super easy to do, follow the guide kindly prepared by our UTA here (Catalina and above compatible). You can also refer to Apple’s guide here.
• Use a free VM:
  • For Big Sur and older: Virtual Box, but setting up the virtual USB can be quite a pain, and it will take forever to build the binary file since you won’t have the full power of your hardware with VMs. You will still need about 70GB-80GB of free space on your machine regardless. Therefore, dual-booting is highly recommended.
  • For Ventura or Sonoma: The most recommended VM is VMWare Fusion Player (version 12, free for personal use): https://customerconnect.vmware.com/web/vmware/evalcenter?p=fusion-player-personal

<aside> 🍎 Xilinx Vivado NOT supported natively on ARM-based computers (MIT concurs)

Sadly, Apple Silicon users need to find another laptop (easiest route). Xilinx Vivado doesn’t officially support ARM as of late 2023 and there's workaround with Parallels and such (tough).

The easiest way is to find somewhere to compile the code (remotely maybe?) and get alchitry.bin file under work/ direcotry to your mac. Then download the Apple Silicon **loader from here** and you can flash the binary to your Alchitry Au board connected to your mac. **Read the next section to find out how to install Vivado on EC2 and use it to build your Alchitry Project.**

As of January 2024, macOS Ventura 13.5 above is needed to run the loader.

Update March 2024: you can Xilinx Vivado using Rosetta + UTM + Debian 12. Read this guide.

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