And the repositories[1] themselves. You can also help them with the code - see the bunch of ideas[2] for the project.
Developing open-source FPGA tools
11–20 of 80 posts
Re: Developing open-source FPGA tools
#12I think the best way to support this kind of effort is to have more people know what FPGA is and what they can do with it ... So they can use the tools and tinker with this stuff. So if you're into this space just write more content : articles, how-to's, videos, tutorials etc.
A colleague and I bought TinyFPGA boards to learn FPGA. So far I can do everything I need with a microcontroller, but would like to get ahead of the game. I got "LED Blink" working, which is the embedded version of Hello World.
It's a great product.
There's definitely a quality gradient from mainstream OS development tools down to FPGAs.
Re: Developing open-source FPGA tools
#13For those who are not familiar with silicon vendors' toolchain, it really is very poor quality especially when they started pushing for GUI based Graphical/System development. Vendors make money selling silicon, they see the toolchain as a necessary evil. There are 2018 tools that are still unable to fully support VHDL-2008 standard. Many bugs reported years again remain open. And often the GUI centric approach means…
Can't agree more. We literally have a version controlled Windows image with Vivada just to be able to quickly restore it when it breaks.
We switched nearly all of our PCs to Linux, and it's ironic that it is our engineers' computers that still have to be on Windows because of Solidworks, MCU toolchains, Virtuoso and other semi tooling
Re: Developing open-source FPGA tools
#14For those who are not familiar with silicon vendors' toolchain, it really is very poor quality especially when they started pushing for GUI based Graphical/System development. Vendors make money selling silicon, they see the toolchain as a necessary evil. There are 2018 tools that are still unable to fully support VHDL-2008 standard. Many bugs reported years again remain open. And often the GUI centric approach means…
Seems like every GUI based programming language I've worked with doesn't work well with version control. I get a dozen emails a day about someone locking/unlocking a file - if two people modify the file at the same time there is a merge conflict and no way to resolve the difference. Until git can merge two conflicting files in a sane way ("git mergetool" launching a custom merge GUI would be fine if it worked - I'm not locked into must be able to us vi to merge)
Re: Developing open-source FPGA tools
#15What are people doing with FPGAs? I'd be really interested in understanding or seeing some cool projects!
Re: Developing open-source FPGA tools
#16What are people doing with FPGAs? I'd be really interested in understanding or seeing some cool projects!
Driving a lot of LEDs: https://mobile.twitter.com/GregDavill/status/119251563062629...
Processing video (especially if you have weird requirements like 14 bit greyscale input): https://gregdavill.com/blog/2018/9/9/boson-camera-project-pa...
Experimenting with non-mainstream CPUs: https://www.thanassis.space/myowncpu.html
Re: Developing open-source FPGA tools
#17What are people doing with FPGAs? I'd be really interested in understanding or seeing some cool projects!
it's also used in high frequency trading (market data processing, order passing, light strategies)
Re: Developing open-source FPGA tools
#18Re: Developing open-source FPGA tools
#19For those who are not familiar with silicon vendors' toolchain, it really is very poor quality especially when they started pushing for GUI based Graphical/System development. Vendors make money selling silicon, they see the toolchain as a necessary evil. There are 2018 tools that are still unable to fully support VHDL-2008 standard. Many bugs reported years again remain open. And often the GUI centric approach means…
Can't agree more. We literally have a version controlled Windows image with Vivada just to be able to quickly restore it when it breaks. We switched nearly all of our PCs to Linux, and it's ironic that it is our engineers' computers that still have to be on Windows because of Solidworks, MCU toolchains, Virtuoso and other semi tooling
The non-software engineering world is laughably behind the times when it comes to computer technology and software. SolidWorks is one of the defacto industry standard CAD packages, and their version control software essentially just creates copies of the files and increments the versions. There's no real concept of change management on the content level.
Re: Developing open-source FPGA tools
#20What are people doing with FPGAs? I'd be really interested in understanding or seeing some cool projects!
it's also used in high frequency trading (market data processing, order passing, light strategies)
That's probably only one of many applications. Just search for DFE (data flow engine). Maxeler is one of the manufacturers.