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The reason it's like this (and I agree it sucks) is that this kind of software is quite complex to develop and the likely userbase is very small. If you're a ho
by tdeck 2y ago
The reason it's like this (and I agree it sucks) is that this kind of software is quite complex to develop and the likely userbase is very small. If you're a hobbyist or even a professional engineer and your goal is to make a specific thing to accomplish a task, rather than use a specific technology, well over 99% of the projects you can think of doing will be much better served by a commodity microprocessor than an FPGA. And cheap MCUs are getting faster every day, so certain things that might have needed an FPGA in the past can make do with programmable microcontroller I/O and maybe an affordable DSP chip today.
- adrian_b 2y agoThe main obstacle in developing such software is not its complexity, but the fact that the FPGA manufacturers do not document the format of their bit streams that must be used to program a FPGA. It is the same like the difficulty of making a compiler and assembler for a CPU for which the manufacturer does not document its machine language (like the NVIDIA GPUs, but at least NVIDIA documents an intermediate language that you can use as a target for your compiler, while the FPGA vendors do not document anything).
- blihp 2y agoNot so complex as to prevent this from existing: https://github.com/YosysHQ https://github.com/YosysHQ (if you have a supported device, these tools work quite well) The limiting factor is that to support a given device it has to be reverse engineered since FPGA vendors don't want to provide the necessary details... that's the main issue.