This project aimed to develop support for NanoXplore’s NG-Ultra architecture within the open-source place-and-route tool nextpnr, as an alternative to the proprietary Impulse tool. Extensive benchmarking showed that nextpnr’s performance is generally comparable to Impulse, though some areas need improvement. The results confirmed nextpnr’s capability to support large FPGAs and perform netlist transformations and placement optimizations. Future improvements may include support for high-speed I/O and SoC, and further placement optimizations.

The project focused on integrating nextpnr with NG-Ultra FPGAs, which are high-reliability, radiation-hardened devices used in critical environments like space. The primary goal was to create an alternative to the proprietary Impulse tool by implementing support for NG-Ultra within nextpnr. The implementation covered a basic set of primitives and extended to commonly used manually instantiated primitives, with some additional features included.

In conclusion, the integration of nextpnr with NG-Ultra represents a major achievement in open-source FPGA development, as it is by far the largest FPGA supported by open-source tooling. The tool provides developers with a flexible and customizable option for designing for NG-Ultra FPGAs, offering increased reliability through the ability to cross-verify designs using two independent tools. Although there are challenges ahead in terms of optimising performance and expanding tool functionality, this project has laid the foundation for ongoing innovation and collaboration in the FPGA development community.