Taping out an FPGA in 24 hours with OpenFPGA: The SOFA Project

Abstract

This paper highlights the Skywater Open-source embedded FpgAs (SOFA) project, which is a series of open-source embedded FPGA IPs built with the Skywater 130nm technology. The SOFA project showcases an agile prototyping methodology for FPGAs, enabled by the OpenFPGA framework, whose fabrication-ready layouts are generated in 24 hours. We also present the associated Verilog-to-Bitstream toolchain for end users.