Running Project F designs

Warning

F4PGA does not currently support the MMCME2_BASE primitive–a key commponent in Project F’s clock_gen_480p module and all designs involving video output. As such, all of the designs in project F that require a display (all designs in FPGA graphics) will fail when run through the toolchain. Only the designs in Hello Arty are currently officially supported. To track the progress of the MMCME2_BASE see issue #153 and issue SymbiFlow/f4pga-arch-defs#2246. One user was able to successfully run most of the display designs in project F by replacing the MMCM in clock_gen_480p.sv with a PLLE2_ADV. For details on that see issue #180 in f4pga-examples.

Project F is an amazing repository containing many high quality FPGA example designs that show some of the more impressive things you can do with an FPGA. You can find detailed documentation on the designs and how they work on the developers blog.

To build the Designs in Project F using F4PGA, first ensure that you have installed the Project F submodule locally. Enter into the f4pga-examples directory and run:

git submodule update --init --recursive

After installing the Submodules, you can run any supported design by calling its makefile:

TARGET="<board type>" make -C projf-makefiles/<design module>/<design subset>/<design number or part name>

For example, to build the first design in project F’s hello ary designs:

TARGET="arty_35" make -C projf-makefiles/hello/hello-arty/A

To download the bitstream to the board run make download. For example, to download the first design from hello arty, run the following in F4PGA’s root directory:

TARGET="arty_35" make download -C projf-makefiles/hello/hello-arty/A