smetzger

I have finally gotten a full tool path to work completely self-contained on my M1 MacBook Pro. I am running Ventura on the MAC and have a fresh copy of Windows 11 (ARM) running in a Parallels VM. For Verilog design I am using Icarus on the MAC and GTKWave (Scansion, which I like better, does not work on the M1 very well). I installed Vitis and Vivado 22.2 on the Windows 11 ARM VM (ML license version). I can take a couple of old designs and have been able to run them through Vivado, synthesize, implement, and generate a bit file. I have been unable to get the target hardware to be recognized by Vivado in the tool, so I have used openFPGAloader to program the bit files into my CMOD A7's (from MACOS), which are the only FPGA development modules I have. I have been able to load in a temporary image, and have also used openFPGAloader to load an image into the CMOD's FLASH memory for permanent use. This flow is functional, but a bit slow right now. It is quite a bit slower than when I run Vivado on my 6 year old Intel MacBook in a Parallels-Linux VM. Also, I have had a couple of hangs when I jump from step to step, like from Synthesis to Implementation. Offsetting the slowness of Vivado is the big speed improvement in Icarus on the MAC side. I have not yet gotten a successful behavioral simulation to run in Vivado. Since I am using Icarus for Verilog functional verification, this is not a killer. I am looking forward to when Xilinx gets an ARM image of Vivado running, I am sure the performance will be sparkling. I cannot imagine that they will stick with x86 binaries on Windows or Linux forever as that is gradually becoming a smaller portion of the market. I bought the M1 Mac a bit early, primarily for the incredible performance in Blender and for doing computationally intensive work. For that it has been great. 3DCAD and FPGA is starting to catch up. Windows 11 on ARM is a huge help as the emulation is "serviceable". Native apps on ARM should be awesome.