ChipTools is a utility to automate FPGA build and verification

What can it do?

ChipTools aims to simplify the process of building and testing FPGA designs by providing a consistent interface to vendor applications and automating simulation and synthesis flows.

Key features

• Seamlessly switch between vendor applications without modifying build scripts or project files.
• Enhance testbenches with Python based stimulus generation and checking.
• Automate test execution and reporting using the Python Unittest framework.
• Automatically check and archive build outputs.
• Preprocess and update files before synthesis to automate tasks such as updating version registers.
• Free and open source under the Apache 2.0 License.

Getting Started

  # Clone the ChipTools repository to your system:
  $ git clone --recursive https://github.com/pabennett/chiptools.git
  
  # Install using the setup.py script provided in the root directory:
  $ cd chiptools
  $ python setup.py install
  
  # Start the ChipTools command line interface:
  $ cd examples/max_hold
  $ chiptools
  
  # Load the example project:
  (cmd) load_project max_hold.xml
  
  # Run the testsuite using Modelsim:
  (cmd) run_tests modelsim
  
  # ...or Vivado (GHDL and ISIM are also supported):
  (cmd) run_tests vivado
  
  # Synthesise the max_hold component in the lib_max_hold library (ISE, Vivado and Quartus are supported)
  (cmd) synthesise lib_max_hold.max_hold

Refer to the documentation for examples on using ChipTools to simulate and build FPGA designs.

Supported Tools

The following tools are currently supported, support for additional tools will be added in the future.

Simulation Tools

• Modelsim (tested with 10.3)
• ISIM (tested with 14.7)
• GHDL (tested with 0.31)
• Vivado (tested with 2015.4)
• Icarus (tested with 0.9.7)

Synthesis Tools

• Xilinx ISE (tested with 14.7)
• Quartus (tested with 13.1)
• Vivado (tested with 2015.4)