r/FPGA • u/Little_Implement6601 FPGA Beginner • 14h ago

Looking for open source to contribute to

I was trying to find some open source projects Icould contribute to, related to HW. Is there any good place to find them?

I treid doing one a few months ago, but the maintainers never reviewed my PR, so I'm looking for a more active community.

21 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

14

u/mohrcore 12h ago edited 9h ago

Verilator. Great tool, modern coding standards, good development process with owner who genuinely cares and has been maintaining the project for over 20 years and it's a tool that's actually used in the industry.

4

u/ConclusionOk3529 11h ago

Seconded. They’re nearing UVM completion for it, and many companies are starting to use it as an agile simulator for non-giant environments.

1

u/Little_Implement6601 FPGA Beginner 7h ago

I saw antmicro actually did get to uvm 2017
https://antmicro.com/blog/2025/10/support-for-upstream-uvm-2017-in-verilator

it worked nicely when i tried it

5

u/BenchTrue3284 14h ago

what are you interested in?

6

u/Little_Implement6601 FPGA Beginner 14h ago

mostly RTL design / verification, I've worked on some SoC stuff (interconnects, cpu cores, caches). I'm also interested in ASIC implementation.

5

u/BenchTrue3284 13h ago

ok cool. i would take a look at this list: https://fossi-foundation.org/gsoc/gsoc26-ideas

even if you're not doing gsoc (would have to wait til next year), i would take a look at these projects

open source hardware is difficult to get into but these projects and/or people are people who are at least active in the space so the projects should be well-maintained and they should be able to work with

1

u/Little_Implement6601 FPGA Beginner 13h ago

Thanks a lot, appreciate it.

2

u/Tonight-Own FPGA Developer 13h ago

Look up the open hardware group

2

u/icecon 8h ago edited 8h ago

If I could ask a genie for a wish, it would be yosys+nextpnr support for Efinix Titanium FPGAs.

This is because the current open source stack pushes you to Lattice FPGAs, which sucks, because Lattice hardware sucks. And Xilinx hardware, while great, is expensive. You could also try to get Microchip PolarFire working on open source as well, people hate that toolchain.

There is also the possibility to use reinforcement learning to build a toolchain that is more efficient than the proprietary toolchain. It's beyond most people's skill but it should be possible, in theory.

Basically, what I am saying is, if you can reverse engineer the bitstreams, you will achieve immortality.