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> đź“ş 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)
Total space required: ~60GB (excluding OS)
Supported OS: Windows, Linux x86
<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 use Xilinx Vivado using Rosetta + UTM + Debian 12. Read this guide.
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