| .. _Flows: | |
| Introduction | |
| ============ | |
| This section provides a description of the F4PGA toolchain as well as the basic concepts of the FPGA design flow. | |
| F4PGA is an end-to-end FPGA synthesis toolchain, because of that it provides all the necessary tools to convert input | |
| Hardware Description Language (HDL) sources into a final bitstream. | |
| It is simple to use however, the whole synthesis and implementation process is not trivial. | |
| The final bitstream format depends on the used platform. | |
| What's more, every platform has different resources and even if some of them provide similar functionality, they can be | |
| implemented in a different way. | |
| In order to be able to match all that variety of possible situations, the creation of the final bitstream is divided | |
| into few steps. | |
| F4PGA uses different programs to create the bitstream and is responsible for their proper integration. | |
| The procedure of converting HDL files into the bitstream is described in the next sections. | |
| .. figure:: ../_static/images/toolchain-flow.svg | |
| :align: center | |
| F4PGA Toolchain design flow |