I’m newbie to nengo Can I modify Nengo-FPGA internal code ? (I want to add my IP to nengo-fpga)
Before buying nengo-fpga lisence, I want to check this thing. Thanks
Hi @chpark, welcome to the forum!
It depends on what it is you want to modify. The Python portion of Nengo FPGA is available at https://github.com/nengo/nengo-fpga and be modified (either for your own use, or as a public contribution) as per the terms of the license.
The bitstreams that run on the DE1 and Pynq boards are not publicly available and are not modifiable.
What are you hoping to achieve through your modifications? If you’re looking to build a certain model using the FPGA, it’s likely that you won’t have to modify the bitstream internals to achieve that. If you’re looking to extend what Nengo FPGA can do in terms of what runs on the FPGA versus the CPU cores on the board, buying a license will not be sufficient.
In any case, let us know what you’re looking to achieve and we’ll do whatever we can to support your use case. If you’d rather not disclose that on this public forum, send me a direct message.
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Dear @tbekolay, Thank you for your reply.
I am a graduate student studying computer architecture. And I would like to research about the way to improve SNN accelerator’s energy efficiency by modifying its architecture.
Being unskilled in handling FPGA, however, I wanted to modify on completed model rather than starting from bottom. If there exist any way to modify the FPGA module and you let me know, I would appreciate it if you let me know.
I’ll forward this thread along to the FPGA team; as far as I know, we haven’t done any research collaborations before on the underlying FPGA bitstreams, so I can’t say for sure whether they’d be open to it or not. In the meantime, if you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend reading Ben Morcos’s thesis which has a lot of the details on how it’s implemented (and is here on the forum if you have questions: @bmorcos).
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