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oscimpDigital

OscillatorIMP ecosystem originally designed for the digital characterization of ultrastable oscillators, provides most frontend processing blocks for Software Defined Radio (SDR) reception.

Motivation

This ecosystem aims at providing a consistent software/hardware, chip independent (Xilinx Zynq, Altera/Intel Cyclone V soc, ... including the Redpitaya STEM 125-14 and Redpitaya SDRlab 122-16 boards) solution, to assemble and build designs targeted for FPGA and to generate and cross-compile software, running on the CPU running embedded GNU/Linux, dedicated to communicate/configure logic parts. The highlights of oscimpDigital were presented at the European GNU Radio Days 2019, Maker Space conference in 2019 and FOSDEM in 2020.

The assumption underlying all IP block design is a pipelined stream of data processed at each clock cycle, with no latencies introduced by FIFOs between blocks.

The tree structure of the project aims at clearly separating the FPGA IPs, Linux kernel modules, userspace libraries and documentation:

Install

This repository is composed of multiple associated submodules (see sub-READMEs to see each repository goal). Please refer to the Wiki for pre-requisites and most significantly Buildroot. Vendor specific tools for synthetizing for the targeted FPGA are also assumed to be functional and accessible through the PATH. A detailed description of the installation steps for various boards is available at the Wiki page. The case of the Redpitaya STEM 125-14 is detailed at the bottom of the page.

Download

To download this repository and submodules in one command, you need to use

git clone --recursive https://github.com/oscimp/oscimpDigital.git

Or

git clone https://github.com/oscimp/oscimpDigital.git
cd oscimpDigital
git submodule init
git submodule update

to 1/ clone oscimpDigital and 2/ add submodule contents.

Update

To update repositories you need to use

git pull
git submodule update

Software environnement

Current Vivado version: 2018.2 to 2019.2

Software parts (applications, libraries and drivers), based on a set of Makefile, uses buildroot to cross-compiles code.

Thus, you need to download, build and flash your board with a buildroot version configured to your target hardware.

For the specific case of the Redpitaya board, not officially supported by buildroot, see red_readme

For the specific case of the PlutoSDR board, not officially supported by buildroot, see plutosdr_readme

Configuration

The OscillatorIMP ecosystem uses shell environment variables to locate each repository (lib, fpga_ip, linux_driver and app) to allow In or Out Tree access. In addition to these variables, two other variables are mandatory to know the target board and the buildroot root absolute path for cross-compilation.

A sample script (settings.sh.sample) is proposed as reference to provide a complete variable set. You must copy this file and adapt its content to your specific case, mainly filling the fields:

  • BOARD_NAME: with the name of your board (redpitaya, redpitaya16, plutosdr, de0nanosoc zedboard as described in the comment at the beginning of the configuration file). This variable will be used to determine subdirectories of NFS root, to build designs and run Makefiles accordingly.
  • BR_DIR: with the absolute path of your buildroot. this information is mandatory to have access to the cross-compiler, linux tree and some other applications. See above the Software environnement section on how to install buildroot if needed.
  • OSCIMP_DIGITAL_NFS (optional): when you use make install for a Linux driver or an application, files are copied to a sub-directory of $OSCIMP_DIGITAL_NFS/$BOARD_NAME. By default OSCIMP_DIGITAL_NFS=/nfs. Change this variable if you want to install files in other location.

Once this file has been filled and named settings.sh, the command:

source /somewhere/settings.sh

will add these variables to the current environment.

Warning: the previous command will add variables only to the current terminal. To make this setting permanent, the script sourcing must be added in the user's ~/.bashrc.

How it compares with existing solutions ?

Various FPGA design frameworks have been available. Here we list the reasons for pursuing this particular approach of close FPGA/Linux module/GNULinux userspace codesign with respect to other approaches:

  • the proprietary approach: of course Xilinx (Vivado) & Altera/Intel (Quartus) provide ready made blackbox solutions to FPGA programming. If you want a vendor-locked solution, these are probably the best alternatives. We want to invest in vendor independent solution that will allow to deploy the framework on any field programmable gate arrays, whether from current (Xilinx/Altera-Intel/Lattice-Microsemi) or future vendors
  • Ettus Research has developed RFNOC, an excellent tool for their board but hardly portable to any other platform. A fixed bitstream allows routing packets amongst a fixed set of IPs, as opposed to the proposed approach of a close co-design between the IPs needed for a given design and the associated Linux tools (kernel space and userspace) generated for each new design.
  • HLS (High-level Language Synthesis): at the moment most HLS designs require FIFOs and are not compatible with high throughput streaming data processing, as considered in the radiofrequency data processing for software defined radio
  • Migen/Mikymist/ARTIQ (M-Lab)

Getting started