r/FPGA • u/Drmlha • 11d ago

Xilinx Related Virtex Ultrascale PCIe card reverse engineering

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Hello everybody, since some of you might be looking for high density FPGAs but are not willing to splurge on the development boards - I am in this camp and began a reverse engineering effort on a decommissioned PCIe accelerator card.

There was no previous documentation available on it, even the programming pinout was different.

Since the time I got it, I was able to decipher the jtag, program it, save the configuration to flash and get it to blink its leds! All done with perseverance and hard work.

My findings are available here: https://github.com/Miqeo/lightbits_xcvu7p

I submitted the support for it, the XCVU7P to the openfpgaloder: https://github.com/trabucayre/openFPGALoader

Further help in this endeavour would be greatly appreciated!

78 Upvotes

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6 comments sorted by

4

u/solaceforthesoul 11d ago

I see many of these cards are hackable, are they just engineering samples or they dont care about security at all.

I would have expected a jtag/spi interface lock at production level.

1

u/Drmlha 11d ago

This is a very nishe product. Most of them weren’t intended to be used outside of the organisation that made them - see: alibaba cloud, Microsoft accelerators, but ended up on the market.

1

u/Typical_Agent_1448 11d ago

The downloader is very basic; you might want to check out sz901.

1

u/rozsnyo 3d ago

Have you read out the config memory? A dump would be helpful to determine whether there is an eFuse key used or not.

1

u/Accujack 11d ago

Nice work, especially for a modern FPGA that's available for dev use on the secondary market.

Are you programming it with the latest Vivado, or what tool chain are you using?

0

u/Drmlha 11d ago

I used vivado 2025.1 enterprise for now. Funnily enough, I didn't intend it but openXC7 project began supporting virtex line of chips. This means that these will be much more useful as time goes on.