I think that the demand for Open Source FPGA tools is a real thing, but it is a very old problem now. The bitstream format hasn't been exposed since the xilinx

I think that the demand for Open Source FPGA tools is a real thing, but it is a very old problem now. The bitstream format hasn't been exposed since the xilinx xc6200 in the 90's, which has led to it being commonly used in FPGA compiler research. There have been efforts to reverse engineer the bitstream format, a notable paper on the subject is called "from the bitstream to the netlist:" http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1344729 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1344729 This paper will explain how to reverse engineer the xilinx bitstream by examining the xdl intermediary format. the source code from this project is here (not updated since 2008): http://code.google.com/p/debit/source/list http://code.google.com/p/debit/source/list I think that in addition to open source tools, FPGAs will need cloud-hosted simulation, synthesis and place-and-route tools that can handle scaling up to designs with many millions of logic gates. Even in a well-partitioned design, a small change to the logic takes forever to recompile to FPGA.