Viewing profile — diamondman

I found this attendant console in a thrift store in San Francisco for $4. It is covered with LEDs and buttons, and has a very high build quality. I thought about how hard it would …

I disagree that it is trivial. If we know what bits of the unencrypted bitstream do what, and have a cryptographically secure way of signing the stream, then GLHF with that. If it …

This is an interesting story. An unfortunate end. Most of these things sound like short term issues that get resolved as the tools are made. Alternately Xilinx could have just put …

'get to the level' of ISE... I disagree. I do not want to build an IDE. I want an open toolchain, the thing that the ISE interface calls. There is some math in there that takes cer…

This feels like circular logic to me. We do not want the hardware companies spending time 'open sourcing' their docs because they need to spend that time and money 'making more fea…

When you say 'good, efficient software' i wonder if you are talking about Xilinx ISE/Vivado, or any of the tools from their competitors. I can not imagine you are.

Note that Altera's compiler for Open CL does not let you run your OpenCl stuff faster. It is intended so you can write your FPGA programs (that run outside of your computer usually…

You have to change out a certain DLL for POST windows 8 in order to get ISE to behave and not crash randomly. YAY! Xilinx said they didn't care but somewhere on their support forum…

Companies seem to be terrified of trying anything. That is why I was happy when Sony put The Interview up on the internet and theaters for simultaneous release. No one would try th…

Those jobs also pay you to sell your ideas that you are never allowed to use again unless you continue working for the company you sold it to. And if you have the gall to use your …

Very well written. I had no idea some companies went so far as directly making their debugger the software key. That is intense but makes a lot of sense. In the case of the Xilinx …

Amusingly the Xilinx license states that you are not allowed to use the bitstreams generated by their software in any device that they did not manufacture. This means if you implem…

OP here I get there is a big difference between hardware and software, but I feel that certain parts of the gaps are closing. They will not CLOSE, but as they get closer we can lea…

OP here This is a severe problem that saddens me greatly. For now I am just writing tools to make JTAG/SPI/etc loading of chips Ubiquitous to the developer writing software/netlist…

OpenCL support for FPGAs is super limited and only done through vendor specific tools. The point of these tools is more to LET you write your FPGA program that runs outside of a de…

Sadly it is private. It is a channel for reverse engineering silicon devices. If you are interested and you hang out in IRC channels for microcontrollers, FPGAs, etc, and ask the r…

I get the idea you are aiming for, but this will not work. GPUs are vector processors. They are good at certain types of repetitive unrelated (parallel) math. They can be good at s…

In the future if my tool for loading the chips works and is adopted, I hope to define an interface for using FPGAs directly in the computer similar to how OpenCL defines an interfa…

I am replying to this comment instead of the multiple people under it. You guys are right that FPGAs are not quite ready, or maybe will never be ready to be the primary radio for a…

Oh god i never noticed that! Maybe it does not install when running the native linux ISE.

Haha, not at all. I do not take it as an attack or anything :). The UI is obvious. The inability to use most of the intermediate file formats for anything since they are secret for…

Several friends complain about the arcane nature of verilog and vhdl and like the idea of better languages written by actual language designers. But since the steps of FPGA compili…

OP here You are right that my particular project is not the biggest piece, but it is the part that pisses me off. I can deal with Xilinx's crappy compiler if I can program my chips…

OP here dominicgs had some good ideas since software defined radio is very powerful. One extreme example of something you could do with a reconfigurable radio signal processor in y…