Awesome

SmolDVI

I'm playing with direct DVI output on iCEBreaker and iCEstick dev boards. The iCE40 UP5k on the iCEBreaker is challenging because it's extremely slow, and the iCE40 HX1k on the iCEstick is extremely small, so I guess this is a project to build a small, fast DVI core.

The example design currently uses 9% of an iCE40 UP5k (240 LUTs, quite a few CDC flops, 499 LCs post-pack) for a pixel-doubled RGB666 640x480p 60 Hz output. This leaves plenty of room on the UP5k to add a more interesting source of pixels!

I've displayed a 640x480p 60Hz test pattern with mild timing violations on UP5k, and a 1280x720p 30Hz (372 Mbps/lane) test pattern with much more exciting levels of timing violation. The 640x480p is something that I think could be practical, but I don't see 720p being much more than a party trick.

TMDS encode takes place in the pixel clock domain, and uses quite a nice trick to perform the encode with minimal logic (around 20 LUTs per lane), which is described in the comments. This trick does limit the colour depth to RGB777, and requires horizontal pixel doubling, but the resulting encoder is far smaller than the one given in the DVI spec, whilst exactly matching its output. Go read the source!

The example design uses the UP5k's single PLL to generate a half-rate TMDS bit clock (126 MHz in the case of 480p60), and divides this down to a 25.2 MHz pixel clock in-fabric.

Building the Example Design

You will need to have yosys, icestorm and nextpnr-ice40 installed on your system.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/Wren6991/SmolDVI.git smoldvi
cd smoldvi
. sourceme
cd synth
make -f Icebreaker.mk prog

This will build a UP5k FPGA image and flash it to an iCEBreaker plugged into your system. You will need some kind of PMOD to HDMI/DVI adapter to connect this to a display. See the pin constraints file for pinout. I am using this adapter I knocked up in KiCad.

In the synth directory, you will also find two other Makefile stubs, Icesugar.mk and Icestick.mk. These are for the iCESugar (a wonderful, cheaply available UP5k board) and iCEstick dev boards.

Reusing

This repository is licensed under CC0 1.0 Universal. You'll want to use all of the Verilog files in hdl/smoldvi, with smoldvi.v being the top level file. The DVI mode timings and RGB bit depth are both configurable via top-level module parameters.

You'll also need to provide a module called ddr_out, which instantiates a DDR output buffer on your platform. Currently I'm using a version of this from libfpga (pulled in via submodule if you do a recursive clone on SmolDVI), which requires the preprocessor symbol FPGA_ICE40 to be defined in order to instantiate a SB_IO primitive on iCE40.

The design requires two clocks:

• clk_pix running at DVI pixel clock
• clk_bit running at half the TMDS bit clock, i.e. 5x clk_pix

These must derive from a single root oscillator. You'll also need to provide an active-low asynchronous reset for each of these domains, with its deassertion synchronised to the rising edge of the clock. You can see an example instantiation in the iCEBreaker top-level.

If you do something cool with this hardware, then please @ me on Twitter, I would love to see it! If you can find space in your Readme for a link to this repository, that would also be much appreciated, but it's not required.