Author Topic: GateMate - An European FPGA  (Read 22845 times)

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Online RoGeorgeTopic starter

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GateMate - An European FPGA
« on: March 02, 2024, 06:48:42 am »
They say "The Only European FPGA":
https://www.colognechip.com/
https://colognechip.com/docs/CologneChip-GateMate-Productbrief-latest.pdf

Presenting the GateMate FPGA Evaluation Board from Cologne Chip
Johannes 4GNU_Linu

Offline Mahagam

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Re: GateMate - An European FPGA
« Reply #1 on: March 02, 2024, 08:58:10 am »
Where can I find documentation? Where is software?
 

Online RoGeorgeTopic starter

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Re: GateMate - An European FPGA
« Reply #2 on: March 02, 2024, 09:43:58 am »
No idea, somewhere inside their website:  https://www.colognechip.com/

Synthesis suite software:  https://github.com/YosysHQ/yosys
Docs and datasheets (there are tabs in the middle of the webpage, click on the 'Documentation' tab):  https://www.colognechip.com/programmable-logic/gatemate/

Offline iMo

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Re: GateMate - An European FPGA
« Reply #3 on: March 02, 2024, 09:57:20 am »
Quote
Dual 4 inputs with 2-input lookup table (LUT-2) tree each

I wonder what will be the improvement over 4inputs or 6inputs LUTs..
 

Offline Beta_vulgaris

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Re: GateMate - An European FPGA
« Reply #4 on: March 02, 2024, 10:00:02 am »
Atmel AT40KEL040/ATF280 are also designed in Europe.
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Offline cfbsoftware

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Re: GateMate - An European FPGA
« Reply #5 on: March 02, 2024, 10:41:06 pm »
Olimex (another European company) are now producing a board which uses a GateMate:

https://www.olimex.com/Products/FPGA/GateMate/GateMateA1-EVB/open-source-hardware
Chris Burrows
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Offline SiliconWizard

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Re: GateMate - An European FPGA
« Reply #6 on: March 02, 2024, 10:46:32 pm »
Olimex (another European company) are now producing a board which uses a GateMate:

https://www.olimex.com/Products/FPGA/GateMate/GateMateA1-EVB/open-source-hardware

Ah, that's cool if we want to evaluate it. From the vendor's website, apparently you need to contact sales just to buy an eval board, and I'm suspecting the price may be quite a bit higher. Unless I've missed some pages.

The FPGA seems to only be available as one package for now.
 

Offline SiliconWizard

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Re: GateMate - An European FPGA
« Reply #7 on: March 02, 2024, 10:52:42 pm »
Note that this isn't quite the only european company designing FPGAs, although this one is certainly more niche, with radiation-hardened parts: https://nanoxplore.com/
 

Online ataradov

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Re: GateMate - An European FPGA
« Reply #8 on: March 02, 2024, 11:24:06 pm »
On a positive side, this is not vaporware, since at least some devices are available. They also seem to be using open source tooling.

But the only available package is not great. Would be nice to see something in TQFP.
Alex
 

Offline Someone

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Re: GateMate - An European FPGA
« Reply #9 on: March 03, 2024, 12:47:27 am »
Quote
Dual 4 inputs with 2-input lookup table (LUT-2) tree each
I wonder what will be the improvement over 4inputs or 6inputs LUTs.
Reverse, it is a huge step backwards from n-lut.
 

Offline iMo

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Re: GateMate - An European FPGA
« Reply #10 on: March 03, 2024, 10:22:44 am »
Quote
Dual 4 inputs with 2-input lookup table (LUT-2) tree each
I wonder what will be the improvement over 4inputs or 6inputs LUTs.
Reverse, it is a huge step backwards from n-lut.

I think the fpga design comes from the people around the yosys/nextprn (as they reverse engineered the ice40 afaik), the arch close to the Lattice's ice40, with the LUTs somehow modified - not sure what was the reason to mess with the LUTs that way - perhaps some IP/patents?
 

Offline nctnico

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Re: GateMate - An European FPGA
« Reply #11 on: March 03, 2024, 12:47:24 pm »
Either way, it is quite interesting to see that the Yosis opensource FPGA design tools opens the door for chip designers to come up with their own FPGAs.
There are small lies, big lies and then there is what is on the screen of your oscilloscope.
 
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Offline cfbsoftware

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Re: GateMate - An European FPGA
« Reply #12 on: March 04, 2024, 01:41:10 am »
Olimex (another European company) are now producing a board which uses a GateMate:

https://www.olimex.com/Products/FPGA/GateMate/GateMateA1-EVB/open-source-hardware

Ah, that's cool if we want to evaluate it. From the vendor's website, apparently you need to contact sales just to buy an eval board, and I'm suspecting the price may be quite a bit higher. Unless I've missed some pages.
You can buy the Olimex GateMateA1-EVB board directly from Olimex at the URL above for EU 50.

You can buy the Cologne Chip CCGM1A1-E1 evaluation board from DigiKey. The price is quite a bit higher at $US 260:

https://www.digikey.com.au/en/products/detail/cologne-chip/CCGM1A1-E1/16087880

FYI GitHub user fm4dd has published the designs for a couple of daughterboards and a RISCV tutorial for the CCGM1A1:

https://github.com/fm4dd

Chris Burrows
CFB Software
https://www.astrobe.com
 

Offline up8051

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Re: GateMate - An European FPGA
« Reply #13 on: March 04, 2024, 09:59:22 am »
GateMate don't support 3.3V I/O
Quote
General Purpose IOs (GPIOs) can use different voltage levels from 1.2 to 2.5 Volt.
 

Online woofy

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Re: GateMate - An European FPGA
« Reply #14 on: March 04, 2024, 10:28:09 am »
Olimex (another European company) are now producing a board which uses a GateMate:

https://www.olimex.com/Products/FPGA/GateMate/GateMateA1-EVB/open-source-hardware

Ah, that's cool if we want to evaluate it. From the vendor's website, apparently you need to contact sales just to buy an eval board, and I'm suspecting the price may be quite a bit higher. Unless I've missed some pages.
You can buy the Olimex GateMateA1-EVB board directly from Olimex at the URL above for EU 50.

You can buy the Cologne Chip CCGM1A1-E1 evaluation board from DigiKey. The price is quite a bit higher at $US 260:

https://www.digikey.com.au/en/products/detail/cologne-chip/CCGM1A1-E1/16087880

FYI GitHub user fm4dd has published the designs for a couple of daughterboards and a RISCV tutorial for the CCGM1A1:

https://github.com/fm4dd

Digikey does the Olimex board too, just no stock at the moment.
https://www.digikey.co.uk/en/products/detail/olimex-ltd/GATEMATEA1-EVB/22258042?s=N4IgTCBcDaIOYEMAuBTAtslIC6BfIA

Offline spth

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Re: GateMate - An European FPGA
« Reply #15 on: March 15, 2024, 08:24:02 pm »
Quote
Dual 4 inputs with 2-input lookup table (LUT-2) tree each

I wonder what will be the improvement over 4inputs or 6inputs LUTs..

Looking a the the documentation, the LUT tree is built in a way that it can be used as either two 4-input LUTs or one 8-input LUT (see Figure 4.4 in the "GateMate Primitives Library (November 2023)" pdf).
 

Offline glenenglish

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Re: GateMate - An European FPGA
« Reply #16 on: June 05, 2024, 10:44:33 am »
I spent a couple of hours reading through all the documentation.
Impressive, useful range of features.

and cheap. Something from Europe that is cheap, I don't beleive it !
$16 USD on Digikey for Digikety pricing is cheap.
Looks like they have only need for a single mask set for all devices
.
Time will tell how the tools go. Efinix tools are slowly maturing ... but they've got nothing on mature toolchains and frameworks that the big two have.

Actually the documentation was very readible.
I couldnt figure out of the logic cell can also be a small ram. (like what you use to glue stages together, like 35 bits wide, 8 words deep) . That's a major pain with Efinix, cant be a ram, it chews routing and Fmax suffers (but the fabric is super fast) .

I'm gonna have to try a board.


 

Offline cfbsoftware

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Re: GateMate - An European FPGA
« Reply #17 on: June 06, 2024, 12:13:40 am »
FYI A guy named Anton Kuzmin also has designed several GateMate-related boards:

https://github.com/GMM-7550/gmm7550-hardware

He advised me that he is planning to arrange a community-funded production run in the coming weeks.

Here is a link to a presentation he gave at FOSDEM 2024:

https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/track/libre-soc-fpga-and-vlsi/


Chris Burrows
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https://www.astrobe.com
 
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Offline glenenglish

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Re: GateMate - An European FPGA
« Reply #18 on: June 06, 2024, 01:13:43 am »
I'm really interested in the company and how this came about, maybe it has something to do with some of the big projects (fusion reactors, accelerators etc ) in Europe.

I had a good few emails with their chief of R&D last night.  as I suspected, it's a single mask set , and multiple dies are  on the wafer all connected- and for small devices they just cleave them apart.

very cool
static power is on par with Spartan 7 for the size.

interesting. very different logic cell eh ?

 

Offline laugensalm

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Re: GateMate - An European FPGA
« Reply #19 on: June 06, 2024, 09:20:20 am »
I've done some mapping experiments on their technology using direct synthesis, i.e. not going through their tools which at that time was a Xilinx primitive emulation.
The agreements made won't let me publish the results, but bottomline: The CPE primitives perform very well with cascaded signal processing networks, my dry dock experiments with post-mapping co-simulation hinted that this would perform way better than the classical DSP48 architectures in terms of routing while just using the bits that are needed (in 'stupid' AI acceleration applications, a 4x4 bit truncated multiplier can be just sufficient).

However, this stopped at place & route, the tools just weren't ready at the time and the LUT trees were organized non-optimally, apart from several issues with yosys and their memory inference. So, eventually I was running out of time, gave up, and had to revert to classic LUT-Architectures.

When it comes to power, I would *suspect* that the CPE architecture leaves more room for power optimization when not going through some emulation, but again, never got past the mapping stage. I might want to revisit some issues for academical fun, since the yosys CXXRTL back end turned out to handle quite some complexities.

About the company I know so far that they had been doing ISDN chipsets for a long time. They have obviously gotten some of the (sparsely available) technology funding to get going with their FPGA architecture and avoided all other hypes, apart from an announcement from Tachyum about a cooperation (no comment...).
« Last Edit: June 06, 2024, 11:40:36 am by laugensalm »
 

Offline glenenglish

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Re: GateMate - An European FPGA
« Reply #20 on: June 06, 2024, 09:57:05 am »
thanks for the write up / info, interesting. 
appreciated.

regards,
 


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