I’m looking for recommendations for starting out with FPGAs on macOS: boards, software, setup, books, tutorials, etc.<p>From what I can tell, the usual tools don’t run on macOS and I will need to set up a VM with Linux or Windows. Is anyone working with FPGAs on macOS? How did you set up your machine and what tools / boards do you use? Thank you.
Commercial development toolchains such as Vivado or Quartus require a Windows or Linux system. For me, it's easier to simply set up a separate Linux machine for FPGA development instead of setting up a VM.<p>However, you can use the open source Symbiflow toolchain (<a href="https://symbiflow.github.io" rel="nofollow">https://symbiflow.github.io</a>) to develop Verilog-based systems (there's also a VHDL frontend now AFAIK) for Xilinx 7-Series, Lattice iCE40 and ECP5 FPGAs directly on macOS.<p>For symbiflow, I would recommend a Lattice-based board such as the ulx3s (<a href="https://radiona.org/ulx3s/" rel="nofollow">https://radiona.org/ulx3s/</a>) or icesugar-pro (<a href="https://github.com/wuxx/icesugar-pro" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/wuxx/icesugar-pro</a>), but the Xilinx Arty-7 boards also seem to be supported now.
I did a 2h live tutorial with FOMU [1] during the conference Teardown 2019 and it was a pretty good experience for me. I knew nothing about FPGAs and in a relatively short time I had a mini RISC-V OS up and running and I could compile programs at different level of abstractions.<p>I could recommend to take a look at their tutorials and see what's new/if there's support for newer boards.<p>But in terms of toolchain I really liked it and it worked flawlessly on Mac.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/fomu" rel="nofollow">https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/fomu</a>