Manta – A tool for FPGA Debugging and Rapid Prototyping

Hacker News

Share card

Manta – A tool for FPGA Debugging and Rapid Prototyping

Hi HN! I'm Fischer, and I'm super stoked to share a project that I've been working on for a little over a year: Manta, an open-source, cross-platform, vendor-independent tool for debugging and rapid prototyping with FPGAs. This was originally my Master's Thesis at MIT, where I developed it for our course on FPGA design. We needed an alternative to vendor debugging tools, which only supported x86 machines running Windows or Linux. We were able to patch in macOS support with VMs, but as more students came bringing ARM-based devices, we needed a new tool. So I developed this. It's called Manta, and I've just released v1.0.0. It's written in Python using Amaranth HDL, which allows it to run on nearly any machine, and export vendor-agnostic Verilog-2001. It lets you read and write to arbitrary registers and memory on the FPGA, and provides an integrated logic analyzer. It's modular, so you can use any number of these functionalities in any combination, as long as you've got a UART or Ethernet connection to the FPGA. Next up on the docket is adding support for more advanced interfaces like Wishbone, AXI, AHB, and Avalon. And maybe even adding a Web UI for debugging with a logic analyzer in the browser. Or peeking and poking at individual registers. Or issuing arbitrary AHB3 transactions. I'd be super curious to hear your thoughts on the tool! And if you want to kick the tires, be my guest :)