Developing open-source FPGA tools • Hacker News Board

Re: Developing open-source FPGA tools

#21

Post by ur-whale » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 3:22 PM UTC

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #8

For 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…

Xilinx's toolchain is the worst piece of software I've ever had to work with.

There are two things that amaze me:

1. That the dumpster fire is actually capable at all to synthesize hardware without exploding

2. That their head of software still has a job.

Re: Developing open-source FPGA tools

#22

Post by ddorian43 » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 3:26 PM UTC

djhworld wrote: post #15

What are people doing with FPGAs? I'd be really interested in understanding or seeing some cool projects!

Example: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-cat... (bing search etc)

Re: Developing open-source FPGA tools

#23

Post by DarkWiiPlayer » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 3:28 PM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #9

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #8

For 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…

Psst…I think you mean "silicon".

Psst...I think you mean "silicium" :P

(before any of you start typing your answers: that's the joke)

Re: Developing open-source FPGA tools

#24

Post by rough-sea » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 3:32 PM UTC

I wish there was an open source FPGA silicon design.

Re: Developing open-source FPGA tools

#25

Post by DarkWiiPlayer » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 3:32 PM UTC

mdtusz wrote: post #19

baybal2 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OpenSCAD is a nice example of how this kinda stuff can work. It's nowhere near viable as a general purpose CAD program, but the concept could easily scaled up to the level of SolidWorks.

Its file format works very well with version control systems, is human readable to an extent and can be opened with any text editor (so your data isn't 100% gone if one bit gets accidentally flipped).

Re: Developing open-source FPGA tools

#26

Post by monocasa » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 3:39 PM UTC

djhworld wrote: post #15

What are people doing with FPGAs? I'd be really interested in understanding or seeing some cool projects!

Motor control for a pretty high number of motors.

There's rumors that a couple of the big cloud vendors use them on network cards for SDN.

Integration with non standard peripherals like ku band radios on a satellite.

Re: Developing open-source FPGA tools

#27

Post by brandmeyer » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 3:40 PM UTC

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #8

For 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…

> Also specifically with Xilinx they seem to have zero consideration for basic version control and create/duplicate/modify an explosion of files and cached versions of files.

There is an ugly feedback loop here. HDL tools interact poorly with version control -> it is difficult to collaborate using those tools -> HDL engineers would rather silo up than fight the tools -> no pressure to improve tools' support for version control.

Re: Developing open-source FPGA tools

#28

Post by guipsp » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 3:48 PM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #26

djhworld wrote: post #15

What are people doing with FPGAs? I'd be really interested in understanding or seeing some cool projects!

Motor control for a pretty high number of motors. There's rumors that a couple of the big cloud vendors use them on network cards for SDN. Integration with non standard peripherals like ku band radios on a satellite.

>There's rumors that a couple of the big cloud vendors use them on network cards for SDN.

No rumours needed, the papers are out there in the open.

Re: Developing open-source FPGA tools

#29

Post by monocasa » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 3:55 PM UTC

guipsp wrote: post #28

monocasa wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Motor control for a pretty high number of motors. There's rumors that a couple of the big cloud vendors use them on network cards for SDN. Integration with non standard peripherals like ku band radios on a satellite.

>There's rumors that a couple of the big cloud vendors use them on network cards for SDN. No rumours needed, the papers are out there in the open.

I said rumors due to saying "a couple". I know that azure is pretty public about it, but I didn't think AWS and Google were.

Re: Developing open-source FPGA tools

#30

Post by PanosJee » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 3:57 PM UTC

ur-whale wrote: post #21

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #8

For 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…

Xilinx's toolchain is the worst piece of software I've ever had to work with. There are two things that amaze me: 1. That the dumpster fire is actually capable at all to synthesize hardware without exploding 2. That their head of software still has a job.

Try inaccel.com