[Cryptography] Raspberry Pi-like FPGA ??

[Ondrej Mikle]

On Tue, Jul 18, 2017 at 4:02 PM, Henry Baker <hbaker1 at pipeline.com> wrote:

> Does anyone sell a cheap, easy-to-experiment with, FPGA?
>

I used the Papilio Board (some seems to still be on stock at
gadgetfactory.net, though the smallest cheapest ones are sold out).

This is a good book to start with if you know nothing about programming
FPGA:
https://github.com/hamsternz/IntroToSpartanFPGABook/blob/master/IntroToSpartanFPGABook.pdf
(it's actually for the Papilio Board). It teaches VHDL, but once you
understand the core concepts it's not a problem to learn Verilog. Be
prepared that doing crypto with this will be a lot of pain (I know because
I learned writing pipelined parallelized multicore DES cracker that does 1
key try/1 clock at max possible clock speed and DES is pretty simple).


> What sort of SW tools are available -- e.g., C-like
> compilers, emulators, etc. ?
>

There is AFAIK only one option for completely open-source toolchain: for
Lattice boards. All others need the respective vendors' tools to generate
bitstream. Two major vendors are Xilinx and Altera and IDEs from both are
pain (though I found equivalent of internal compiler error only in Altera's
Quartus). Furthermore, the IDEs are not always free. For small FPGAs (e.g.
up to 75k LUTs on Spartan 6), Xilinx ISE is free with webpack license. If
you wanted to program a bigger FPGA (e.g. reuse the Ztex 1.15y boards that
were used for bitcoin mining some years ago, you'd need a paid license).


OM
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/attachments/20170719/d6303fa6/attachment.html>