Awesome

Mistral - A Cyclone V bitstream library

What is it?

It's the very first version of a library/command line utility to compile and decompile Cyclone V bitstreams, as used in the de-10 nano (used in MiSTer) and the future Analogue Pocket.

Compile and install

It's a normal cmake project. Create a build directory, run cmake <source directoty> from it then your preferred builder (make, ninja...). The only dependency is liblzma.

It takes the usual cmake variables (CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX, CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE) and also proposes the variable COMPRESSION_LEVEL to choose the level of compression of the internal data. It's a size/time choice. Default is 1.

Some quick tests on a good laptop are in the following table. The run time is for running the bels command for a 5CGTFD9C5F23I7 (gt300f, the biggest).

Go into the lib directory, run 'make'. This will generate a command-line utility named mistral-cv. You can start it from that directory, but nowhere else because it looks for the routing databases in ../gdata. Read the doc, that should help. It's very, very raw at this point.

The makefile does not currently build the library as a library. But everything that's not main.cc is in fact the library. There is only one header file, cyclonev.h.

How to help?

There are a lot of things that can be done to help without having to look inside quartus. Meanwhile mapping of the blocks and work on the timings will go on.

Logic block RE

A bunch of stuff is unsure or not know at all on logic blocks. They can be analyzed through creating appropriate verilog files, compiling them with quartus and decompiling them with mistral-cv.

• The common part of LABs (routing of clocks, enables, clears) is very unsure.
• Mlabs in rom/ram mode are unknown.
• DSPs and M10ks are really unknown, neither the mux usage nor the ports mapping is unknown.
• Most peripheral blocks have their ports mapped, or are going to have them, but the mux usage is not understood.