6 ms·

I'm surprised to see no recognition of yosys, arachne-pnr and the icestorm tools which together are a free and open source HDL tool chain which already exists a

by zik 8y ago

I'm surprised to see no recognition of yosys, arachne-pnr and the icestorm tools which together are a free and open source HDL tool chain which already exists and is pretty widely used.

ur-whale 8y ago
These two projects are exactly the road the EDA industry should be taking. Unfortunately, they make very slow progress because they have to painstakingly reverse-engineer everything (with the possible exception of Lattice stuff). For Xilinx chips, where exactly nothing is publicly documented at the lower levels of the stack, they have to spend mountains of time re-discovering everything. Even if I deeply admire the effort and how far they've gotten, I can't help but think: what a terrible waste of human talent and time. Edit: I once asked a Xilinx employee why they didn't OpenSource their entire software stack, because it struck me that they were in the chip manufacturing business, and not in the toolchain business (a blisteringly obvious fact when you look at the quality of such monstrosities as, e.g., Vivado), and that OpenSourcing the tools would potentially enlarge their potential target market by a large margin. The culture is so broken in that space that I don't think he even actually understood the question.
- cottonseed 8y ago
  > with the possible exception of Lattice stuff > For Xilinx chips, where exactly nothing is publicly documented at the lower levels of the stack, they have to spend mountains of time re-discovering everything. The situation with Lattice parts was the same; they reverse engineered them.
  - ur-whale 8y ago
    Thanks, didn't realize that, in my naiveté I thought Lattice actully helped :(
- 437598735 8y ago
  Note I don't work at Xilinx. And be prepared that what I'm about to write may seem incredibly cynical, sorry. But if I were to take a guess at why the culture is the way it is, I'd say that it's because programmable logic is fundamentally relatively small logic tiles replicated across large areas. That means across competing companies there's a high chance for infringing upon arsenals of patents for rather mundane things like interconnect, logic families, or memory cell layout where there are only a handful of viable alternatives yet the patent offices were likely duped into accepting multiple legalese interpretations of the same underlying tech. It's a minefield. Xilinx is not really a chip manufacturing business either. They're fabless. Imagine having a company that designs RAM memory and outsources everything beyond the cell design. If you don't own the foundry itself you're not going to last very long unless you encrypt the memory access protocols, obfuscate your (probably patent infringing) hardware architecture by layers of undocumented tooling, and dominate the industry by buying up any upcoming contenders while cross-licensing stuff to build up a complex ecosystem of interdependent tools required to get even the most basic project done.
  - ur-whale 8y ago
    Thanks for that perspective, I had not considered the angle that the EDA industry is scared of itself because of patents. Once more, the problem can be traced to the root evil that is patents, sold to the world as essential for innovation, but which end up having the exact opposite effect.

by zik 8y ago

I'm surprised to see no recognition of yosys, arachne-pnr and the icestorm tools which together are a free and open source HDL tool chain which already exists and is pretty widely used.

ur-whale 8y ago

These two projects are exactly the road the EDA industry should be taking. Unfortunately, they make very slow progress because they have to painstakingly reverse-engineer everything (with the possible exception of Lattice stuff). For Xilinx chips, where exactly nothing is publicly documented at the lower levels of the stack, they have to spend mountains of time re-discovering everything. Even if I deeply admire the effort and how far they've gotten, I can't help but think: what a terrible waste of human talent and time. Edit: I once asked a Xilinx employee why they didn't OpenSource their entire software stack, because it struck me that they were in the chip manufacturing business, and not in the toolchain business (a blisteringly obvious fact when you look at the quality of such monstrosities as, e.g., Vivado), and that OpenSourcing the tools would potentially enlarge their potential target market by a large margin. The culture is so broken in that space that I don't think he even actually understood the question.

cottonseed 8y ago
> with the possible exception of Lattice stuff > For Xilinx chips, where exactly nothing is publicly documented at the lower levels of the stack, they have to spend mountains of time re-discovering everything. The situation with Lattice parts was the same; they reverse engineered them.
- ur-whale 8y ago
  Thanks, didn't realize that, in my naiveté I thought Lattice actully helped :(
437598735 8y ago
Note I don't work at Xilinx. And be prepared that what I'm about to write may seem incredibly cynical, sorry. But if I were to take a guess at why the culture is the way it is, I'd say that it's because programmable logic is fundamentally relatively small logic tiles replicated across large areas. That means across competing companies there's a high chance for infringing upon arsenals of patents for rather mundane things like interconnect, logic families, or memory cell layout where there are only a handful of viable alternatives yet the patent offices were likely duped into accepting multiple legalese interpretations of the same underlying tech. It's a minefield. Xilinx is not really a chip manufacturing business either. They're fabless. Imagine having a company that designs RAM memory and outsources everything beyond the cell design. If you don't own the foundry itself you're not going to last very long unless you encrypt the memory access protocols, obfuscate your (probably patent infringing) hardware architecture by layers of undocumented tooling, and dominate the industry by buying up any upcoming contenders while cross-licensing stuff to build up a complex ecosystem of interdependent tools required to get even the most basic project done.
- ur-whale 8y ago
  Thanks for that perspective, I had not considered the angle that the EDA industry is scared of itself because of patents. Once more, the problem can be traced to the root evil that is patents, sold to the world as essential for innovation, but which end up having the exact opposite effect.