Tcl API

OpenFPGA can be loaded to a Tcl shell in the format of shared library. OpenFPGA’s Tcl APIs are generated by SWIG during compilation. By integrating OpenFPGA to Tcl, developers can utilize OpenFPGA commands in a common shell with other EDA tools, considering most of modern EDA tools adopt Tcl as their user interface. Currently, Tcl 8.6 is supported. Other versions may also work.

Here are the steps to follow:

  • Compile OpenFPGA with SWIG enabled. See details in How to Compile.

  • The shared library of OpenFPGA is available under the build/openfpga/openfpgashell.so

  • Launch a tcl shell and load the shared library. For example

load openfpga_shell.so

  • Create a new OpenFPGA shell object. For example

std::OpenfpgaShell my_shell

  • OpenFPGA command can be called by through a sub command run_command. For example, the command read_openfpga_arch (see Setup OpenFPGA for details) is now run in the following way:

my_shell run_command "read_openfpga_arch --file ~/OpenFPGA/openfpga_flow/openfpga_arch/k4_N4_40nm_bank_openfpga.xml"