The Lack of Open Tooling for FPGAs
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The Lack of Open Tooling for FPGAs
1–10 of 125 posts
Re: The Lack of Open Tooling for FPGAs
#2Delete the "A" from the first link to see the referenced comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9388751
Re: The Lack of Open Tooling for FPGAs
#3Delete the "A" from the first link to see the referenced comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9388751
[deleted]
Re: The Lack of Open Tooling for FPGAs
#4Delete the "A" from the first link to see the referenced comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9388751
fixed thanks
Re: The Lack of Open Tooling for FPGAs
#5The tools for FPGAs are horribly clunky and extremely difficult to script since most are Windows GUI based.
Glad to see people working to rectify this.
Re: The Lack of Open Tooling for FPGAs
#6The tools for FPGAs are horribly clunky and extremely difficult to script since most are Windows GUI based. Glad to see people working to rectify this.
Indeed. It's unfortunate that they need to do their work in spite of the companies that make the hardware.
Actually I would like to get involved in that. What are the IRC channels referenced in the post?
Re: The Lack of Open Tooling for FPGAs
#7The tools for FPGAs are horribly clunky and extremely difficult to script since most are Windows GUI based. Glad to see people working to rectify this.
I haven't had problems scripting the Altera tools. We use make on Linux to build things for the Daisho project[1]. Or were you thinking of something more advanced than that?
Having said that, I'm 100% in favour of open tools. I think the current tools are one of the biggest barriers to the use of FPGAs. I also think that they cause a lock-in effect for developers, which hurts FPGA adoption as a whole.
[1] https://github.com/mossmann/daisho/blob/master/sw/fpga/targe...
Re: The Lack of Open Tooling for FPGAs
#8I'll offer a guess as to why the FPGA manufacturers are hostile to open tools. Open tools reveal the internal details of their FPGA hardware which is their bread and butter. I think it is probably the wrong approach, but that sort of thinking is common around intellectual "property."
Re: The Lack of Open Tooling for FPGAs
#9The tools for FPGAs are horribly clunky and extremely difficult to script since most are Windows GUI based. Glad to see people working to rectify this.
Not just FPGA tools, pretty much the whole EE industry.
Few days ago I had trouble saving results from a semiconductor analyzer. The problem? Path had spaces in it. If you have the time to display a warning that it doesn't support spaces (on windows!), you should be able to fix the issue. Just imagine how bloated their codebase that you can't fix issues like this easily.
Recently I was trying to use ModelSim (HDL simulation tool) on a Linux machine, which unfortunately was not running a 10 year old distribution. It was failing with obscure Tcl/Tk errors :). Should have known better not to waste my time. Reinstalled it on a windows machine and now it was having problems connecting to our license server so I had to use a crack from a Chinese BBS (ugh).
I really want work to be done in this area, but one of the giants will either sue you into oblivion or make an offer you can't refuse. Either way nothing productive will get done... :(
Re: The Lack of Open Tooling for FPGAs
#10>I want to pave the way for FPGAs to be usable in everything from laptop/desktop computers to phones (if the static power consumption gets better). I have some very interesting ideas of what an average user could do with in system FPGAs that can be reconfigured at runtime.
What are these ideas?