FPGAs Need a New Future

No mention of video game emulation on FPGA?

No mention of that Brazilian company that was set to manufacture them to undercut the market?

> it's just me and a professor of previously mentioned course who are actively involved in the project

Unfortunately, past experiences I have are that a very small academic team = stay away, project will have too many rough edges.

I hope your experience goes better. Tip: A revenue stream gives you something to work with. Failing that, carefully document your whole architecture so contributors will be willing to help.

## Irrelevant Complaining

Just ran across this last year: good looking software, great concept, first half of features work great … enough to hook me, so when I finally found out the other half was bug ridden I stuck it out but ouch. Needless to say, no design document so even fixing stuff was a pain point.

The whole place-and-route thing is completely wrong for using FPGAs as accelerators. We don't need an optimal layout, we need a tiled layout (like the GPU does). All that we need for this to happen is for the companies making the FPGAs to open up the board layout file spec. They don't need to even make/ship any software at all. Just ship the dang file that says where the resources & timings are and some instructions on how to toggle the LUT config.

My feeling is that hardware companies do better when they ship the software needed to utilize their hardware for free. (You need a little margin in the hardware price to cover the software development). However, the FPGA companies haven't figured this out. They try to make way too much software and charge exhorbitant fees for it, somehow thinking that their hardware is useless without that. In fact, their hardware is useless because I can't put anything on it without a 1-to-20 hour compile time. That makes it impossible to use it as an accelerator. I can compile OpenCL for my GPU in a few milliseconds; that's what we need for the FPGA. Even thirty seconds would be easily tolerable -- there's many a game that still requires 15 seconds to load a level and compile its shaders.

FPGAs could be much more useful than they are at present. They've artificially limited themselves to ASIC prototyping alone.

So Intel bought an FPGA company -- nobody knows why. AMD got scared and did the same thing with no clue what to do with it. They've both let them rot. Intel did start incorporating it into its compiler targets, but it was only half-baked. Now they've wisely divested themselves of the company, but it should have never happened. They should have just focused on selling the hardware at a small margin whilst opening up the data to use it.

This is exactly it.

The FPGA situation is the same as the microcontroller situation before Arduino blew open the flood gates: byzantine proprietary software and libraries you have to pay for to unlock hard IP functionality less you from scratch develop it yourself which can be very difficult. The Arduino gave people a solid kit: Simple to install IDE that wraps up a text editor, tool chain and libraries with matching plug and play hardware.

Arduino took microcontrollers from esoteric hardware for EE's to mainstream "makers" - people who were not technically educated but wanted to makes things using technology. FPGA's need a solid foundation like that.

I briefly worked with FPGAs and was having a lot of fun but the software really ruined it for me. I forget the details but I was moving my web license of the Xilinx tools to my desktop from my laptop, it kept failing and I gave up.

I know exactly what you mean and I share your frustrations with academic software. In our case I think it helps that our main goal is to provide a good user experience: we're not reinventing toolchains from scratch, but rather making existing ones available in a user-friendly way. Especially in the past year or so I've spent a lot of effort on reducing tech debt, modernizing the underlying architecture and squashing bugs. We've gone through several UI iterations just to see what would be most intuitive. Compare that to most pieces of academic software that should technically work, but are so difficult to use that nobody except the developers really know how to utilize it.

Our intention has never been to build a full alternative to e.g. Quartus Prime or Vivado that suits everyone's needs. Our main intention is to show people that FPGA toolchains don't have to be so difficult to get started with, and that alternatives are possible. And yes, I agree, that absolutely means good documentation on several levels to allow other people to continue working on the project. Good thing that's part of our mission, so it will be done; just takes a little bit of time ;)