Programming FPGAs on MacOS

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Tea Leaves

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Published on February 1, 2025 2:51:22 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NTX2qu_SoI

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I'm a multi-platform sort of guy. I have Macs, Windows boxes, and Linux machines. But I do my video production on MacOS, so when making my NAND To Tetris videos, I wanted to try to do some FPGA programming from MacOS, I hit some roadblocks.

I went to the internet to ask for advice, and was shocked to hear hobbyists just dismissing the very idea. This is weird! If your entire goal is to make neat hardware and software hacks, why would you reaction to "I want to do a thing" be "Eh, just follow the manufacturer recommendations and behave yourself?" We should be encouraging unusual development workflows, not stifling them.

Thanks to the people who have worked hard on open source toolchains, we can now program FPGAs on MacOS. In this video, I show you two different ways to do it.

LINKS:
Icestudio: https://icestudio.io/
Nish Tahir's "A (mostly) free FPGA Development workflow for macOS": https://nishtahir.com/a-mostly-free-fpga-development-workflow-for-macos/
Nandland: https://nandland.com/

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