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Same open source discussion again. I’ll try to explain short why it will never happen. Since FPGAs have applications outside hobbyist domain, things are getting
by lnsru 7y ago
Same open source discussion again. I’ll try to explain short why it will never happen. Since FPGAs have applications outside hobbyist domain, things are getting complicated. There are lawyers involved, support contracts signed and vendors are liable for their silicon. Now imagine some open source toolchain is used and some problems occur. Who’s liable? No single vendor will invest a penny into something maintained by somebody else. No single manager on this world will allow me to use 3rd party tools without vendor’s support for €1M FPGA design. There is no business case for silicon vendor to open source anything. Maybe brave hackers will reverse engineer bitstream generation, but this knowledge will be used only among hackers and their friends. Personally I don’t see any advantage using these tools and writing this in my resume, because nobody will use them in industry anyway.
- panpanna 7y ago> There is no business case for silicon vendor to open source anything There is no good business case for the smaller vendors to develop and maintain a full set of very complex software either.
- nicoburns 7y agoYou could surely have said the same about commercial software libraries 10 years ago.
- 0xcde4c3db 7y ago> Maybe brave hackers will reverse engineer bitstream generation As far as I know, the bitstream for 15K/35K/50K Artix-7 is pretty much done, with Kintex-7 and Zynq devices being WIP [1]. I think there are gaps in support for the various hard blocks and PAR at higher layers of the toolchain, but the bitstream reverse engineering per se isn't a maybe-in-the-future thing. [1] https://github.com/SymbiFlow/prjxray https://github.com/SymbiFlow/prjxray