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Clifford Wolf
Personal blog · clifford.athardwareprogrammingsystems
Clifford Wolf writes Claire\'s Homepage, a personal blog at clifford.at about hardware, programming and systems. Since 2008, 80 different Hacker News readers have linked it 109 times, most often “Project IceStorm: open-source toolchain for Lattice iCE40 FPGAs”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-15, and you can follow it by feed.
109mentions?
80HN people?
2008–2021first – last linked?
(formerly known as Clifford Wolf)
Most-linked posts?
- Project IceStorm: open-source toolchain for Lattice iCE40 FPGAs52 people · 62 mentions · first linked 2015-03-24
- /yosys/16 people · 19 mentions · first linked 2015-06-01
- A few small obfuscated Programs2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-03-08
What Hacker News says?
Have you seen Project IceStorm? I don't know if ICE40 FPGAs would be good fit here, but they could definitely be more hobbyist friendly. http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/
Comment linking /icestorm/
on “Show HN: A retro video game console I've been working on in my free time”Submitted Project IceStorm: open-source toolchain for Lattice iCE40 FPGAs as a story · 119 points
HN discussion> However, if this initiative takes off, it'll be a big help in creating an open source EDA toolchain community. The opensource EDA toolchain community is already producing some good stuff, Symbiflow: https://symbiflow.github.io/ is a good example, it's an open source FPGA flow targeting multiple devices. It uses Yosys ( http://www.clifford.at/yosys/ ) as a synthesis tool which is also used by the OpenROAD flow: htt…
Comment linking /yosys/
on “Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips”Submitted IceStorm: Reverse-Engineered Lattice iCE40 FPGA Bitstream as a story · 74 points
HN discussionhttps://clash-lang.org/ http://www.clifford.at/yosys/ I am hoping we can start proving many if the things they brute-force model check today, too.
Comment linking /yosys/
on “TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant”Submitted The Brainf*ck CPU as a story · 27 points
HN discussion>Thanks, the damage was and is pretty bad- and long-lasting. But, "be like water" and all that. I'm slowly pivoting to hardware development. Studying welding and CNC operations now also. Keep at it, you are setting an amazing example here. Very good luck with it all. edit - if you are pivoting to hardware development, get one of these; http://www.latticesemi.com/en/Products/DevelopmentBoardsAndK... use this on it; h…
Comment linking /icestorm/
on “Maker Faire halts operations and lays off all staff”Submitted C++11 std::unordered_set and map are slower than a naive implementation as a story · 18 points
HN discussionHere's a collection of get-started resources: http://tinyurl.com/fpga-resources You can start with the EDA Playground tutorial, practice with HDLBits, while going through a book alongside (e.g., Harris & Harris) for examples, exercises, and best practices. Similarly to a sibling thread, I'd also go with a free and open source flow, IceStorm (for the cheaply available iCE40 FPGAs): http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/ Yo…
Comment linking /papers/2015/yosys-icestorm-etc/
on “Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware”Submitted Yosys Open Synthesis Suite as a story · 15 points
HN discussionI think this is going to be well outside the pricing range for most people to use for an extended period of time, which is necessary for learning a lot. Depends on the specs of the developer AMI, too, which comes with Vivado and everything. But synthesis can be insanely CPU intensive for large designs, so who knows how they'll spec it. It might cost more due to including a Vivado license. And you'll need to do exten…
Comment linking /icestorm/
on “Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware”Submitted A few small obfuscated Programs as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThere are open hardware design tools, some examples: http://iverilog.icarus.com/ https://www.veripool.org/wiki/verilator http://www.clifford.at/yosys/ https://symbiflow.github.io/ https://github.com/Qucs/ADMS http://www.myhdl.org/ https://chisel.eecs.berkeley.edu/ https://wiki.debian.org/FPGA
Comment linking /yosys/
on “Free Wolfram Engine for Developers”Submitted IceStorm – Lattice FPGA bitstream reverse engineered as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAll the major toolchains work on Linux. I personally liked Pynq http://www.pynq.io/ , it works fairly well and is beefy enough to do non-toy projects with it. For something totally barebones you can try https://www.latticesemi.com/Products/DevelopmentBoardsAndKit... , it has the advantage that it has a very nice open source tool flow available for it: http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/ . I own both boards and I work p…
Comment linking /icestorm/
on “Running a Unix-like OS on a home-built CPU with a home-built C compiler”Submitted Project IceStorm: open source toolchain for Lattice iCE40 FPGAs as a story · 2 points
HN discussion>"The barrier to entry in the FPGA world is tooling and expression" Regarding tooling, I'd say it's not quite the barrier it used to be, now that Project IceStorm exists. http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/
Comment linking /icestorm/
on “Computer Science from the Bottom Up (2013)”Submitted A few small obfuscated Programs as a story · 2 points
HN discussioni didn't mean to nitpick and it's not nitpicky since there are now open toolchains (though not for xilinx) that you support verilog as a frontend http://www.clifford.at/yosys/ http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/
Comment linking /icestorm/
on “Open-sourcing a more precise time appliance”Submitted Project IceStorm: documenting the bitstream format of Lattice iCE40 FPGAs as a story · 1 points
HN discussionWould be nice to push up also the other parts of the physical design - LibreCAD[1] and FreeCAD[2], Yosys[3] and Symbiflow[4], Chisel/FIRRTL[5], and many others. [1] https://librecad.org/ [2] https://www.freecadweb.org/ [3] http://www.clifford.at/yosys/ [4] https://symbiflow.github.io/ [5] https://chisel.eecs.berkeley.edu/
Comment linking /yosys/
on “CERN migrates to open-source technologies”Submitted The Craft of API Design as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI know. I'm just assuming FPGA is trusted in TCB, esp with DMA, plus implying many people will want to use it. Your assessment of open HW is accurate. Far as FPGA's, there's progress on several fronts. Some for you to check out that your people might even consider using given the continual payoff of a FPGA w/out high unit costs. Open-source FPGA architecture at 45nm http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EE…
Comment linking /icestorm/
on “Novena: A Laptop with No Secrets”> And there are no open-source toolchains for any of this. There is one fully open source flow, but currently only targeting Lattie iCE40 chips: Project IceStorm. http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/ That said, the synthesis tool (Yosys) can actually synthesize netlists suitable for Xilinx tools, as well. In theory any company could probably add a backend component to Yosys to support their chips. arachne-pnr/icetools c…
Comment linking /icestorm/
on “Epiphany-V: A 1024-core 64-bit RISC processor”Not sure what cores will be needed for you to break out the popcorn. But there are actually quite a few cores available under open and free licenses. First off, the RISC-V community is based on the open ISA. There are several open implementations of the ISA. And the RISC-V community is meaking good headways in developing open tools, peripheral cores etc. https://riscv.org/ Secondly there are at least two attempts at…
Comment linking /yosys/
on “Darpa invests $100M in a silicon compiler”Almost all FPGAs have entirely proprietary toolchains, from Verilog/HDL synthesis all the way down to bitstream loaders for programming your board. These tools are traditionally very poorly built as applications, scriptable only with things like TCL, terrible error messages, godawful user interfaces designed in 1999, etc etc.[1] This makes integrating with them a bit more "interesting" for doing things like build sy…
Comment linking /icestorm/
on “Intel will add deep-learning instructions to its processors”I recently wrote a place and route tool for Lattice iCE40 FPGAs [0]. The bitstream was reverse engineered by Clifford Wolf and others as part of the IceStorm project [1]. We're using Yosys [2] for Verilog synthesis, also written by Clifford. [0] https://github.com/cseed/arachne-pnr [1] http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/ [2] http://www.clifford.at/yosys/
Comment linking /yosys/
on “Intel Buys Altera for $16.7B”Andrew Zonenberg has a whole list of open projects for FPGAs on his wiki: https://github.com/azonenberg/openfpga/wiki There has been a lot of exciting work in the same repo for Silego lines and general foundations for Open Source FPGA toolchains for many of the types out there. I've been really enjoying Clifford's Project IceStorm - open source tools which I've been using to develop/test on real hardware build up so…
Comment linking /icestorm/
on “Open Source Needs FPGAs; FPGAs Need an On-Ramp”This is the only project I know of. http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/
Comment linking /icestorm/
on “Open Source Needs FPGAs; FPGAs Need an On-Ramp”It appears to be a direct link to a README in a subversion repository. Are you arguing that all README files should be markdown or something? http://www.clifford.at/svninfo.html
Comment linking /svninfo.html
on “Teeny Tiny Mansion: text adventure game formally proven to have no dead ends”
