Having worked with both Xilinx & Intel/Altera recently, I can agree that Xilinx works quite nicely. But Altera works equally well and feels much more natural t

Having worked with both Xilinx & Intel/Altera recently, I can agree that Xilinx works quite nicely. But Altera works equally well and feels much more natural to me! Their entire toolchain is very unix-like, which can be seen from an example Makefile like [1] and I had no problems until now to move projects etc. from Windows to Linux and back. Whereas for Xilinx there have to exist tools like [2] or [3] to be able to build your project on the console and I won't start with the problems I've had with moving projects around or the Xilinx Platform Cable under Linux which ended up in me doing only remote ILA'ing via a Windows box (at least that works w/o a problem). Unfortunately since Intel bought Altera it seems that they are pulling more and more out of the normal FPGA market, which can make it harder to get support. Regarding the free tooling, Altera also provides a "Quartus Lite" version which brings you basically the same feature-set than the Xilinx WebPack, for the Altera world. The Altera toolchain is unfortunately harder bound to SuSe or Redhat than the one of Xilinx. I haven't worked with lattice yet, but e.g. [4] looks super promising and their toolchain is said to be very linux friendly as well. [1] https://github.com/cferr/dsp/blob/master/quartus/Makefile https://github.com/cferr/dsp/blob/master/quartus/Makefile [2] https://github.com/cambridgehackers/fpgamake https://github.com/cambridgehackers/fpgamake [3] https://github.com/slaclab/ruckus https://github.com/slaclab/ruckus [4] https://www.crowdsupply.com/1bitsquared/icebreaker-fpga https://www.crowdsupply.com/1bitsquared/icebreaker-fpga Edit formatting