FPGA CAD Tools

• The latest version of VPR , a placement and routing tool for FPGA research, is available from as part of the VTR (Verilog to Routing) source archive.
• VPR and T-VPack version 4.30; this is the version used in Architecture and CAD for Deep-Submicron FPGAs.
• New! COFFE 2 COFFE 2 is a CAD tool that can automatically optimize low-level FPGA circuitry, including the full custom circuitry of logic blocks and routing, the semi-analog circuitry of block RAMs, and the standard cell circuitry of heterogeneous blocks (e.g. DSP blocks). It produces area and delay estimates that can be fed into VPR for architecture exploration. COFFE 2 uses enhanced area and delay modeling vs. prior approaches, and VPR (post 7.0) has been upgraded to also use these enhanced models to be compatible with COFFE.
• New! Hetris: Heterogeneous Floorplanning for FPGAs (coming soon).

FPGA Benchmarks, Architectures, and CAD flows

• New! The Titan23 benchmarks and the Titan flow enable large and complex circuits to be used with academic FPGA CAD tools.
• New! 22 nm VPR architecture files for both pass transistor and transmission-gate-based FPGAs.
• New! Latency-insensitive circuit shell generator and components.
• Nettovqm utility: nettovqm converts a VPR format netlist to the format needed by Altera's Quartus CAD suite, letting you interface T-VPack (version 4.30) output to a commercial CAD system.

FPGA Applications/Designs

• A portable and scalable FPGA-based engine to decompose / solve matrices into LU form. This design "scales up" to intelligently make use of larger FPGAs.

Graphics Software

• EZGL: An easy-to-use graphics interface, layered on top of gtk. This graphics interface provides easy 2D drawing and interactive panning, zooming etc., while allowing use of the underlying gtk toolkit for more UI widgets if desired.
  [Code and getting started documentation] [Detailed Doxygen API documentation] [git repo (only needed if you want to upstream changes)]

• EasyGL is an older interface; it also provides easy 2D drawing, but doesn't let you easily extend the GUI widgets.
  EasyGL: An easy-to-use graphics interface for programming X11, PostScript, and Win32 displays.

Other uses of and contests for FPGA CAD programs

• VPR is part of the SPEC 2000 suite of computer benchmarks (the standard benchmarks used to determine the speed of various workstations). I have found it to be a good predictor of the speed of commercial FPGA CAD tools on various computer hardware as well. Results are here.
• The FPGA Place-and-Route Challenge: a contest for the FPGA community - compare your routing area against the best achieved so far