Interview with Jim Anderson, CEO of Lattice Semiconductor

Post by brianfaith » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 11:54 PM UTC

HansHamster wrote: post #15

fleventynine wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we could get similar momentum we have with gcc and LLVM behind projects like yosys and nextpnr, FPGAs would be much more useful and likely be a larger market overall. I'm willing to personally donate 10k a year to projects like these to liberate myself from crappy vendor tools that I can't improve.

And what really annoys me about Lattice in particular is that they shut down their community forum and now there is basically no way to get any form of support when using a free license. A while ago I found a bug in Lattice Radiant that produced broken PLL configurations. I reproduced this and confirmed that it doesn't happen in their iCECube software, but had no desire to argue with their support about why they shou…

Post by sennight » Tue, Aug 24, 2021, 12:50 AM UTC

touisteur wrote: post #20

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #2

> ... we built out a pretty significant portfolio of these applications solutions and they make it very easy for the customer to adopt our devices into their systems... Very disappointing that on the topic of Software/Toolchain it's more of the same business decisions of just copying the Xilinx/Altera paradigm. Since they seemed rather non-agressive towards Yosys/SymbiFlow they made me quite hopeful that Lattice woul…

I recently discovered that Xilinx has lots of small R&D things I github. I had the opportunity to work with the team behind FINN ( https://xilinx.github.io/finn/ ) and they're trying to do everything, put everything they develop, on github. I will praise this in every future meeting I have with any Xilinx rep. I feel this is a mentality change, albeit slow, that is starting to happen. We still don't have source code…

Post by CamperBob2 » Tue, Aug 24, 2021, 1:29 AM UTC

ohazi wrote: post #10

deelowe wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The secret sauce is in the software. The hardware isn’t that revolutionary. On top of that, fpga vendors have this habit of outsourcing every little thing. This makes it super difficult for them to embrace open source give the IP liabilities.

The secret sauce may be in the software, but the software they sell you is a 1998 edition of Borland C++, and we're all screaming at them to please just make their hardware an LLVM target already.

Post by fleventynine » Tue, Aug 24, 2021, 1:42 AM UTC

brianfaith wrote: post #23

MisterTea wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had fun years ago with FPGA's, first on a digilent nexus 3 and then a terasic de0 nano. I kinda gave up as the IDE's sucked and sucked harder if you were on anything other than windows. I spent hours getting Quartus running on Ubuntu, something to do with the draconian licensing software. I also had issues with ISE on Linux and never bothered to move on to Vivaldo for the same reason, didn't want the headache. Open…

MisterTea, QuickLogic has open source tools for FPGA products here: https://www.quicklogic.com/software/qorc-mcu-efpga-fpga-open... Linux is supported.

Post by fleventynine » Tue, Aug 24, 2021, 2:03 AM UTC

kimmeld wrote: post #29

fleventynine wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we could get similar momentum we have with gcc and LLVM behind projects like yosys and nextpnr, FPGAs would be much more useful and likely be a larger market overall. I'm willing to personally donate 10k a year to projects like these to liberate myself from crappy vendor tools that I can't improve.

The entire EDA stack from front to back is so ridiculously bad. System Verilog, UVM and the ecosystem that works on it are equally terrible. Just depressing all around.