GW5A family support

[fduxiao]

Guys, there is a new GW5A series. Is there any plan to support it? If I want to add the support by myself, how should I get started?

I am new to FPGA and have just known how to use your tool chains for tang nano 9k. Can you explain how you made the tool chains for it and I can then try it for mega 138k?

[pepijndevos]

Of course we'd eventually like to support all Gowing FPGAs. So far the main focus has been those FPGAs for which there are widely available and affordable development boards, which tend to be in the most demand.

If you look through the repo you'll find there is my internship report on how I did the initial development, and I've also done some streams of working through issues. Another piece of useful info might be to look at previous PRs that added support for a new FPGA family.

[jhol]

Cheap boards are available now: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006224593018.html

[pepijndevos]

Any volunteers? ;)

[pepijndevos]

This will require an update of the IDE version we're using, making it more involved than just another device from an already supported series.

Luckily this is a fairly mechanical change so if anyone feels like dipping their toes in FPGA fuzzing it'd be a good place to start. Usually it involves adding a few changes to the parsers and updating the TCL scripts and the dockerfile and things like that.

Sometimes it breaks the fuzzers but we're now less dependent on them so it might be a good opportunity to get rid of "legacy" nextpnr-gowin stuff.