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Developing open-source FPGA tools

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Re: Developing open-source FPGA tools

#71

Post by cmrdporcupine »

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…

Amen. I've been dabbling in the world of FPGA & hardware lately and I don't understand why hardware engineers tolerate the state of their toolsets.

Schematic design tools that make common tasks like drawing/connecting buses an obnoxious hassle involving futzing with the mouse making sure lines and nets line up when one should just be able to describe the whole thing in a DSL and have the tool build up an initial drawing for you.

FPGA "IDEs" with no auto indentation, refactoring/rename, no support for version control, arcane project structures that don't move easily between directory structures, non-modular tools that don't work well or at all outside of the IDE, critical settings buried in dialogs, 'drag and drop' authoring that takes you about 50% of the way to your solution and then falls over in a hot mess.

Demand better

Re: Developing open-source FPGA tools

#72

Post by cmrdporcupine »

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.

I'm using Vivado after having previously attempted Quartus and I can't actually say it's any worse. I was able to eventually find my way around it and in some ways it was more intuitive than Quartus.

I see the pile of ideas they're trying to glue together. But it really just does get in the way more than anything else.

Now my process is: Verilator + CMake + CLion + SystemVerilog plugin for CLion (excellent but $$$); then when it runs well in verilator I bring it over to Vivado, fix any warnings it gripes about and try it on hardware.

Re: Developing open-source FPGA tools

#73

Post by jacobush »

naikrovek wrote: post #66
bluGill wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't help when the file is a binary and nobody has written a tool to merge it. How do you merge a picture?

You're not replying to me, but I imagine you'd decode both images to an uncompressed format and diff them visually, optionally with a way to highlight pixels that differ between the two. Binary file types that you can't view in some way would be challenging.

JPEG doesn't really have pixels though, and with some modern formats it gets even worse. For netlists it's hopeless.

Re: Developing open-source FPGA tools

#74

Post by DoingIsLearning »

dang wrote: post #54
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha indeed! I will leave it for traceability. I had to apply some bathroom silicone sealant over the weekend so I just go ahead and blame it on that.

I removed those sticky e's from your fine comment above. I hope that's ok. It makes the discussion less distracting.

No problem at all, it is a relevant discussion but in a way I now feel I moved attention away from the intent of the OP which was to raise awareness and support for Symbiflow.

Re: Developing open-source FPGA tools

#75

Post by dang »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #74
dang wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I removed those sticky e's from your fine comment above. I hope that's ok. It makes the discussion less distracting.

No problem at all, it is a relevant discussion but in a way I now feel I moved attention away from the intent of the OP which was to raise awareness and support for Symbiflow.

I've edited obvious typos in some comments. I can't seem to help it.

Re: Developing open-source FPGA tools

#76

Post by jlokier »

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.

What amazes me is this, from Wikipedia:

"Replacing the 15 year old ISE with Vivado Design Suite took 1000 person-years and cost US $200 million.[12]"

Re: Developing open-source FPGA tools

#77

Post by cmrdporcupine »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #72
ur-whale wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm using Vivado after having previously attempted Quartus and I can't actually say it's any worse. I was able to eventually find my way around it and in some ways it was more intuitive than Quartus. I see the pile of ideas they're trying to glue together. But it really just does get in the way more than anything else. Now my process is: Verilator + CMake + CLion + SystemVerilog plugin for CLion (excellent but $$$);…

And I've just discovered fusesoc and this is 50x better...

Re: Developing open-source FPGA tools

#78

Post by scott_wilson46 »

gricardo99 wrote: post #48
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…

The toolchain for ASIC/EDA in general is very poor. In 2019 I'm amazed that an open-source HDL simulator is not the de-facto industry standard. The big 3 EDA vendors charge astronomically high prices for simulator licenses, yet Verilog/VHDL along with simulator APIs (DPI/PLI) have been standardized for decades.

In my day job as an FPGA developer I am using totally open source tools for simulation and verification (the only tool we pay for is Vivado but you have to pay for that in order to build for the FPGA). The simulator is icarus verilog and does the job pretty well. I use cocotb for simulation.

Re: Developing open-source FPGA tools

#79

Post by acathla »

dkozel wrote: post #6

This has been the most exciting software work I've seen in the last year. David is doing fantastic work. If you haven't seen anything about the development of these tools his talk at FOSDEM in February was quite good. https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/trellis_and_n...

And you can become his patreon to support his fantastic work : https://www.patreon.com/fpga_dave

Re: Developing open-source FPGA tools

#80

Post by hermitdev »

bsder wrote: post #65
hermitdev wrote: post #64

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Icarus Verilog [0]. I used this extensively when I was in college around 2002. Open source, used to only support FreeBSD (my first BSD exposure), but is cross platform. It saved my ass, as I didnt have to compete for limited lab time on the few Solaris boxes with the proprietary tools we used in my VLSI class while studying EE. I was sitting on my living room floor with my FreeBSD l…

We used Icarus Verilog for a class at SDSU specifically so we weren't saddled with crappy vendor tools. It even worked on Windows. And, come on, how can you argue with a coding team who will make you an honorary "Steve"? (Inside joke: for a while it seemed like everyone who worked on Icarus Verilog was named "Steve" or some variant--so we started joking that anyone not named Steve needed to get rechristened with a ne…

Back when I used Icarus, I dont think it worked on Windows. I'm pretty sure it was the reason I got a cheap laptop off eBay to install FreeBSD on. This would have been around 2002-2003. Regardless, it is an awesome tool and certainly saved me a ton of time. I wish I could comment on its current state, but I just havent used it since college.

Tangential, working on FreeBSD with Icarus is what caused me to learn/love/prefer Vim. It was there. It worked, and I learned (some) of it's quirks.

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