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diff --git a/test/test-pages/blogger/expected.html b/test/test-pages/blogger/expected.html index e7868b9..10b4874 100644 --- a/test/test-pages/blogger/expected.html +++ b/test/test-pages/blogger/expected.html @@ -1,22 +1,22 @@ -<div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-932306423056216142" itemprop="description articleBody"><p> +<div id="post-body-932306423056216142" itemprop="description articleBody"><p> I've written a couple of posts in the past few months but they were all for </p><a href="http://blog.ioactive.com/search/label/Andrew%20Zonenberg">the blog at work</a><p> so I figured I'm long overdue for one on Silicon Exposed.</p><p><h2> So what's a GreenPak?</h2> - </p><p> Silego Technology is a fabless semiconductor company located in the SF Bay area, which makes (among other things) a line of programmable logic devices known as GreenPak. Their </p><a href="http://www.silego.com/products/greenpak5.html">5th generation parts</a><p> were just announced, but I started this project before that happened so I'm still targeting the </p><a href="http://www.silego.com/products/greenpak4.html">4th generation</a><p>.</p><p> GreenPak devices are kind of like itty bitty <a href="http://www.cypress.com/products/32-bit-arm-cortex-m-psoc">PSoCs</a> - they have a mixed signal fabric with an ADC, DACs, comparators, voltage references, plus a digital LUT/FF fabric and some typical digital MCU peripherals like counters and oscillators (but no CPU).</p><p> It's actually an interesting architecture - FPGAs (including some devices marketed as CPLDs) are a 2D array of LUTs connected via wires to adjacent cells, and true (product term) CPLDs are a star topology of AND-OR arrays connected by a crossbar. GreenPak, on the other hand, is a star topology of LUTs, flipflops, and analog/digital hard IP connected to a crossbar.</p><p> Without further ado, here's a block diagram showing all the cool stuff you get in the SLG46620V:</p><p><table class="tr-caption-container"><tbody><tr><td> + </p><p> Silego Technology is a fabless semiconductor company located in the SF Bay area, which makes (among other things) a line of programmable logic devices known as GreenPak. Their </p><a href="http://www.silego.com/products/greenpak5.html">5th generation parts</a><p> were just announced, but I started this project before that happened so I'm still targeting the </p><a href="http://www.silego.com/products/greenpak4.html">4th generation</a><p>.</p><p> GreenPak devices are kind of like itty bitty <a href="http://www.cypress.com/products/32-bit-arm-cortex-m-psoc">PSoCs</a> - they have a mixed signal fabric with an ADC, DACs, comparators, voltage references, plus a digital LUT/FF fabric and some typical digital MCU peripherals like counters and oscillators (but no CPU).</p><p> It's actually an interesting architecture - FPGAs (including some devices marketed as CPLDs) are a 2D array of LUTs connected via wires to adjacent cells, and true (product term) CPLDs are a star topology of AND-OR arrays connected by a crossbar. GreenPak, on the other hand, is a star topology of LUTs, flipflops, and analog/digital hard IP connected to a crossbar.</p><p> Without further ado, here's a block diagram showing all the cool stuff you get in the SLG46620V:</p><p><table><tbody><tr><td> <a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YIPC5jkXkDE/Vy7YPSqFKWI/AAAAAAAAAxI/a7D6Ji2GxoUvcrwUkI4RLZcr2LFQEJCTACLcB/s1600/block-diagram.png" imageanchor="1"><img height="512" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YIPC5jkXkDE/Vy7YPSqFKWI/AAAAAAAAAxI/a7D6Ji2GxoUvcrwUkI4RLZcr2LFQEJCTACLcB/s640/block-diagram.png" width="640"></img></a> </td> - </tr><tr><td class="tr-caption">SLG46620V block diagram (from device datasheet)</td> + </tr><tr><td>SLG46620V block diagram (from device datasheet)</td> </tr></tbody></table> - They're also tiny (the SLG46620V is a 20-pin 0.4mm pitch STQFN measuring 2x3 mm, and the lower gate count SLG46140V is a mere 1.6x2 mm) and probably the cheapest programmable logic device on the market - $0.50 in low volume and less than $0.40 in larger quantities.</p><p> The Vdd range of GreenPak4 is huge, more like what you'd expect from an MCU than an FPGA! It can run on anything from 1.8 to 5V, although performance is only specified at 1.8, 3.3, and 5V nominal voltages. There's also a dual-rail version that trades one of the GPIO pins for a second power supply pin, allowing you to interface to logic at two different voltage levels.</p><p> To support low-cost/space-constrained applications, they even have the configuration memory on die. It's one-time programmable and needs external Vpp to program (presumably Silego didn't want to waste die area on charge pumps that would only be used once) but has a SRAM programming mode for prototyping.</p><p> The best part is that the development software (GreenPak Designer) is free of charge and provided for all major operating systems including Linux! Unfortunately, the only supported design entry method is schematic entry and there's no way to write your design in a HDL.</p><p> While schematics may be fine for quick tinkering on really simple designs, they quickly get unwieldy. The nightmare of a circuit shown below is just a bunch of counters hooked up to LEDs that blink at various rates.</p><p><table class="tr-caption-container"><tbody><tr><td> + They're also tiny (the SLG46620V is a 20-pin 0.4mm pitch STQFN measuring 2x3 mm, and the lower gate count SLG46140V is a mere 1.6x2 mm) and probably the cheapest programmable logic device on the market - $0.50 in low volume and less than $0.40 in larger quantities.</p><p> The Vdd range of GreenPak4 is huge, more like what you'd expect from an MCU than an FPGA! It can run on anything from 1.8 to 5V, although performance is only specified at 1.8, 3.3, and 5V nominal voltages. There's also a dual-rail version that trades one of the GPIO pins for a second power supply pin, allowing you to interface to logic at two different voltage levels.</p><p> To support low-cost/space-constrained applications, they even have the configuration memory on die. It's one-time programmable and needs external Vpp to program (presumably Silego didn't want to waste die area on charge pumps that would only be used once) but has a SRAM programming mode for prototyping.</p><p> The best part is that the development software (GreenPak Designer) is free of charge and provided for all major operating systems including Linux! Unfortunately, the only supported design entry method is schematic entry and there's no way to write your design in a HDL.</p><p> While schematics may be fine for quick tinkering on really simple designs, they quickly get unwieldy. The nightmare of a circuit shown below is just a bunch of counters hooked up to LEDs that blink at various rates.</p><p><table><tbody><tr><td> <a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-k3naUT3uXao/Vy7WFac246I/AAAAAAAAAw8/mePy_ostO8QJra5ZJrbP2WGhTlJ0B_r8gCLcB/s1600/schematic-from-hell.png" imageanchor="1"><img height="334" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-k3naUT3uXao/Vy7WFac246I/AAAAAAAAAw8/mePy_ostO8QJra5ZJrbP2WGhTlJ0B_r8gCLcB/s640/schematic-from-hell.png" width="640"></img></a> </td> - </tr><tr><td class="tr-caption">Schematic from hell!</td> + </tr><tr><td>Schematic from hell!</td> </tr></tbody></table> As if this wasn't enough of a problem, the largest GreenPak4 device (the SLG46620V) is split into two halves with limited routing between them, and the GUI doesn't help the user manage this complexity at all - you have to draw your schematic in two halves and add "cross connections" between them.</p><p> The icing on the cake is that schematics are a pain to diff and collaborate on. Although GreenPak schematics are XML based, which is a touch better than binary, who wants to read a giant XML diff and try to figure out what's going on in the circuit?</p><p> This isn't going to be a post on the quirks of Silego's software, though - that would be boring. As it turns out, there's one more exciting feature of these chips that I didn't mention earlier: the configuration bitstream is 100% documented in the device datasheet! This is unheard of in the programmable logic world. As Nick of Arachnid Labs <a href="http://www.arachnidlabs.com/blog/2015/03/30/greenpak/">says</a>, the chip is "just dying for someone to write a VHDL or Verilog compiler for it". As you can probably guess by from the title of this post, I've been busy doing exactly that.</p><p><h2> Great! How does it work?</h2> - </p><p> Rather than wasting time writing a synthesizer, I decided to write a GreenPak technology library for Clifford Wolf's excellent open source synthesis tool, </p><a href="http://www.clifford.at/yosys/">Yosys</a><p>, and then make a place-and-route tool to turn that into a final netlist. The post-PAR netlist can then be loaded into GreenPak Designer in order to program the device.</p><p> The first step of the process is to run the "synth_greenpak4" Yosys flow on the Verilog source. This runs a generic RTL synthesis pass, then some coarse-grained extraction passes to infer shift register and counter cells from behavioral logic, and finally maps the remaining logic to LUT/FF cells and outputs a JSON-formatted netlist.</p><p> Once the design has been synthesized, my tool (named, surprisingly, gp4par) is then launched on the netlist. It begins by parsing the JSON and constructing a directed graph of cell objects in memory. A second graph, containing all of the primitives in the device and the legal connections between them, is then created based on the device specified on the command line. (As of now only the SLG46620V is supported; the SLG46621V can be added fairly easily but the SLG46140V has a slightly different microarchitecture which will require a bit more work to support.)</p><p> After the graphs are generated, each node in the netlist graph is assigned a numeric label identifying the type of cell and each node in the device graph is assigned a list of legal labels: for example, an I/O buffer site is legal for an input buffer, output buffer, or bidirectional buffer.</p><p><table class="tr-caption-container"><tbody><tr><td> + </p><p> Rather than wasting time writing a synthesizer, I decided to write a GreenPak technology library for Clifford Wolf's excellent open source synthesis tool, </p><a href="http://www.clifford.at/yosys/">Yosys</a><p>, and then make a place-and-route tool to turn that into a final netlist. The post-PAR netlist can then be loaded into GreenPak Designer in order to program the device.</p><p> The first step of the process is to run the "synth_greenpak4" Yosys flow on the Verilog source. This runs a generic RTL synthesis pass, then some coarse-grained extraction passes to infer shift register and counter cells from behavioral logic, and finally maps the remaining logic to LUT/FF cells and outputs a JSON-formatted netlist.</p><p> Once the design has been synthesized, my tool (named, surprisingly, gp4par) is then launched on the netlist. It begins by parsing the JSON and constructing a directed graph of cell objects in memory. A second graph, containing all of the primitives in the device and the legal connections between them, is then created based on the device specified on the command line. (As of now only the SLG46620V is supported; the SLG46621V can be added fairly easily but the SLG46140V has a slightly different microarchitecture which will require a bit more work to support.)</p><p> After the graphs are generated, each node in the netlist graph is assigned a numeric label identifying the type of cell and each node in the device graph is assigned a list of legal labels: for example, an I/O buffer site is legal for an input buffer, output buffer, or bidirectional buffer.</p><p><table><tbody><tr><td> <a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kIekczO693g/Vy7dBqYifXI/AAAAAAAAAxc/hMNJBs5bedIQOrBzzkhq4gbmhR-n58EQwCLcB/s1600/graph-labels.png" imageanchor="1"><img height="141" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kIekczO693g/Vy7dBqYifXI/AAAAAAAAAxc/hMNJBs5bedIQOrBzzkhq4gbmhR-n58EQwCLcB/s400/graph-labels.png" width="400"></img></a> </td> - </tr><tr><td class="tr-caption">Example labeling for a subset of the netlist and device graphs</td> + </tr><tr><td>Example labeling for a subset of the netlist and device graphs</td> </tr></tbody></table> The labeled nodes now need to be placed. The initial placement uses a simple greedy algorithm to create a valid (although not necessarily optimal or even routable) placement:</p><br></br><ol><li>Loop over the cells in the netlist. If any cell has a LOC constraint, which locks the cell to a specific physical site, attempt to assign the node to the specified site. If the specified node is the wrong type, doesn't exist, or is already used by another constrained node, the constraint is invalid so fail with an error.</li> <li>Loop over all of the unconstrained cells in the netlist and assign them to the first unused site with the right label. If none are available, the design is too big for the device so fail with an error.</li> |