ESR status tracker

[olofk]

This is a meta issue to keep track of the status of the migration to Edalize (Slight Return). While there are still a lot of things that needs to be figured out it shows already that some planned feature additions like custom yosys frontends, reusing nextpnr in multiple flows and other things will be much easier if we get parts of this done already.

The current plan consists of two first steps that are prerequisites for the rest of the work. Once those steps are done, we are already in a much better position to add new features while we can figure out the remaining arcihtectural questions. The overarching goal of the initial steps is to provide better separation between tools in a toolchain so that they can be plugged together more freely. The toolchain will then become more of a wrapper that guides the dataflow between the tools

1. Replace makefile templates with a new command generator. This allows each tool to define their own makefile rules instead of leaving this to the toolchain. Long term it will also allow using other command executers than makefiles
2. Make each tool use an EDAM structure to describe the inputs and produce a new EDAM structure that describes its outputs. This way the toolchain doesn't need to keep track of all formats produced and consumed by the different tools

Current status is in this branch where yosys and all backends that use yosys will be converted first.

Makefile generation

• apicula
• icestorm
• symbiflow VPR
• symbiflow NextPNR
• trellis
• vivado
• yosys

EDAM interfaces

• apicula
• icestorm
• symbiflow VPR
• symbiflow NextPNR
• trellis
• vivado
• yosys

[olofk]

The Flow API has been live now for a couple of versions, so let's close this.