Demonstration of the Fabulous FPGA design flow using the Skywater 130 process.

The design flow includes the specification of the routing fabric, individual tiles, and the exact fabric description. This is used to implement heterogeneous tiles for logic, memory, and I/O that are then stitched together to a fabric.

The Fabulous tool generates all RTL codes, physical constraints for the implementation, a model for the Yosys-Abc-Nextpnr FPGA CAD suite as well as a bitstream assembler. Additionally, our flow provides an emulation path to test Fabulous FPGA systems on commercial FPGAs.

We will demonstrate how external modules can be integrated into Fabulous fabrics including configuration support. All this is supported with good quality of results (Area, Performance, Power) and very little design effort.

FABulous is designed to fulfill the objectives of ease of use, maximum portability to different process nodes, good control for customization, and delivering good area, power, and performance characteristics of the generated FPGA fabrics. The framework provides templates for logic, arithmetic, memory, and I/O blocks that can be easily stitched together, whilst enabling users to add their own fully customized blocks and primitives.

The FABulous ecosystem generates the embedded FPGA fabric for chip fabrication, integrates SymbiFlow toolchain release packages, deals with the bitstream generation and after fabrication tests.

The CAD toolchain can be found at FABulous: an Embedded FPGA Framework.