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> So how does having a closed tool chain achieve that? It doesn't. It slows reverse engineering, but doesn't itself prevent cloning. I'm not sure what ChuckM

> So how does having a closed tool chain achieve that? It doesn't. It slows reverse engineering, but doesn't itself prevent cloning. I'm not sure what ChuckMcM was trying to argue. I don't know of any big companies that care whether or not the toolchain/devices are open source. They just want a way to get their design into the world. What we (users of FPGAs) care about is price; the toolchains are sufficient (though yes, cruddy in various ways). And to be honest, this conversation about the FPGA (and ASIC) toolchains being closed sources crops up again and again. They're closed source not because Altera/Xilinx/Microsemi need to keep secrets. They already know eachother's "secrets", and the FPGAs themselves are rather trivial devices. They're closed source not because users want them to be; again they couldn't care less. They're closed source because the userbase is absolutely tiny. A small userbase means we will only ever see tools that are sufficient. There is no benefit to Altera/Xilinx/Microsemi to put in extra time and effort open sourcing their work. And honestly, I wouldn't want them to. I'd rather their time and resources go into continuing to drive the price down and features up (as does every other company). Not that I don't think opensource toolchains/devices wouldn't be great. I follow the MiGen/Milkymist mailing list where some open source FPGA tools are being developed. But in the commercial space, open sourcing FPGAs and their tools isn't the highest priority. Going back to protecting designs, that's what bitstream encryption is for, which all modern FPGAs possess. Though Altera was quite late to the ballgame on that front with their Cyclone series...

minthd 12y ago
Sure the fpga companies don't want anybody to know how to build their software. Building good fpga's is not that hard(if you're intel, or quallcom or any other of the big guys). But building good, efficient software is very hard, takes decades and tens of thousands of customers designs to run it on.
- diamondman 12y ago
  When you say 'good, efficient software' i wonder if you are talking about Xilinx ISE/Vivado, or any of the tools from their competitors. I can not imagine you are.
  - minthd 12y ago
    Have you noticed anybody else with better software and chips ? no ? maybe because it's extremely hard to to get to the level of ISE and the competitors ?
    - ChuckMcM 12y ago
      Well Quartus isn't bad. It will be interesting to see what Intel does with it. They have a history of open sourcing things other folks don't want to open source (like Graphics Drivers).
    - diamondman 12y ago
      'get to the level' of ISE... I disagree. I do not want to build an IDE. I want an open toolchain, the thing that the ISE interface calls. There is some math in there that takes certain skills to implement, but I know several people who could do it if they had the layout of the chips. MAYBE the reason there are no open toolchains 'on the level' of ISE and competitors is not because Xilinx has some amazing secret sauce and is instead because the whole industry is caustically secretive and horribly anti competition.
diamondman 12y ago
This feels like circular logic to me. We do not want the hardware companies spending time 'open sourcing' their docs because they need to spend that time and money 'making more features' which they wouldn't have to do alone if it was open, but we can't have it open because spending the time and money 'open sourcing' their docs...... I think there is a big difference between 'users wanting tools to be closed source' and 'users not caring if their tools are closed source'. And I would argue that even if the primary user base does not care, we can do better than that. It is no excuse to use these fragile lumbering behemoths of bad design and super seeeeecret tricks that you can learn in a university or the internet. And history keeps showing the problems of big black boxes with the words 'trust us' written on the outside. All we need is the layout and a map of the bitstream and open developers will do most of the work for these companies. As for spending their resources 'driving prices down', that is quite relative. And if you look at the pricing model of their software it is clearly not their goal to make that reasonable (at least Xilinx). And every version of the software stretches to provide arbitrary bullet points on the back of a box that either mean nothing, were tested in suspicious conditions, or conflate multiple optimized tests together and say 'we are better than everyone at everything. How many times will that be said by all competitors at the same time, and how many times will it be believed? Anyways, with all those features, somehow ISE is still unstable on windows.
- gedrap 12y ago
  >>> which they wouldn't have to do alone if it was open Well, that's an assumption. User base is very small, and potential contributors base is even smaller. So that would be a big bet hoping that someone would contribute to make it worthwhile. However, your statement is true when it comes to more mainstream technologies like ruby or javascript.
  - phkahler 12y ago
    But each company has it's own tools. That means redundant development. If they just worked on one set of open source tools, it should reduce development costs. It also opens the door to researchers to try things directly in the mainstream tools. That means not having to re-implement things published in papers, but instead deciding weather or not to merge a feature from a branch.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
> I'm not sure what ChuckMcM was trying to argue. If you create a circuit board which has all of the same chips as someone else, if you've changed the layout, you are completely within your rights to sell it as your own and keep all the money. However, if you copy firmware, then creating a circuit board with the copied firmware is a copyright violation and you can be found guilty of copyright infringement at most of our trading partners. For folks who built cloned CPU boards with a copyrighted BIOS they re-implemented the BIOS in a clean room to have their own "work alike" version, which then gave them the right to sell their boards. If however you copy an FPGA bitstream, which is the compiled output of a copyrighted HDL description, you're in violation. But building a 'clean room' implementation of an FPGA bitstream is generally infeasible as it requires you to both know how the manufacturer encodes and encrypts it, and all of the functions of the internal chip. A really great example of this in action was that the recent flap over "clone" FTDI USB to serial chips, wasn't a clone of the chip at all. Instead the cloners used an ARM M0 CPU with a USB peripheral and a UART peripheral and a bit of code that responded in all of the same ways in which the FTDI chip (which was presumably an ASIC) responded. That 'workalike' implementation was only possible because the set of inputs and outputs for that system are constrained, and the only IP violation was the re-use of FTDI's VID/PID pair. If they had been forced to use a bitstream file for an FPGA they would be liable for up to $30,000 per copy, and jail.
makomk 12y ago
Some people have been preventing cloning by locking their bitstream to the FPGA's unique serial number, which exists partly to allow people to do this. This is trivial to work around if you know the bitstream and device internals.
- diamondman 12y ago
  I disagree that it is trivial. If we know what bits of the unencrypted bitstream do what, and have a cryptographically secure way of signing the stream, then GLHF with that. If it turns out that documenting the parts of the chip required for configuration makes the black box security not work, then it was crap security and provided no real security to anyone. As it stands there is no way to tell and we have to take the smiling sales guy's word that it is "SUPER secure, promise".

minthd 12y ago

Sure the fpga companies don't want anybody to know how to build their software. Building good fpga's is not that hard(if you're intel, or quallcom or any other of the big guys). But building good, efficient software is very hard, takes decades and tens of thousands of customers designs to run it on.

diamondman 12y ago
When you say 'good, efficient software' i wonder if you are talking about Xilinx ISE/Vivado, or any of the tools from their competitors. I can not imagine you are.
- minthd 12y ago
  Have you noticed anybody else with better software and chips ? no ? maybe because it's extremely hard to to get to the level of ISE and the competitors ?
  - ChuckMcM 12y ago
    Well Quartus isn't bad. It will be interesting to see what Intel does with it. They have a history of open sourcing things other folks don't want to open source (like Graphics Drivers).
  - diamondman 12y ago
    'get to the level' of ISE... I disagree. I do not want to build an IDE. I want an open toolchain, the thing that the ISE interface calls. There is some math in there that takes certain skills to implement, but I know several people who could do it if they had the layout of the chips. MAYBE the reason there are no open toolchains 'on the level' of ISE and competitors is not because Xilinx has some amazing secret sauce and is instead because the whole industry is caustically secretive and horribly anti competition.

diamondman 12y ago

This feels like circular logic to me. We do not want the hardware companies spending time 'open sourcing' their docs because they need to spend that time and money 'making more features' which they wouldn't have to do alone if it was open, but we can't have it open because spending the time and money 'open sourcing' their docs...... I think there is a big difference between 'users wanting tools to be closed source' and 'users not caring if their tools are closed source'. And I would argue that even if the primary user base does not care, we can do better than that. It is no excuse to use these fragile lumbering behemoths of bad design and super seeeeecret tricks that you can learn in a university or the internet. And history keeps showing the problems of big black boxes with the words 'trust us' written on the outside. All we need is the layout and a map of the bitstream and open developers will do most of the work for these companies. As for spending their resources 'driving prices down', that is quite relative. And if you look at the pricing model of their software it is clearly not their goal to make that reasonable (at least Xilinx). And every version of the software stretches to provide arbitrary bullet points on the back of a box that either mean nothing, were tested in suspicious conditions, or conflate multiple optimized tests together and say 'we are better than everyone at everything. How many times will that be said by all competitors at the same time, and how many times will it be believed? Anyways, with all those features, somehow ISE is still unstable on windows.

gedrap 12y ago
>>> which they wouldn't have to do alone if it was open Well, that's an assumption. User base is very small, and potential contributors base is even smaller. So that would be a big bet hoping that someone would contribute to make it worthwhile. However, your statement is true when it comes to more mainstream technologies like ruby or javascript.
- phkahler 12y ago
  But each company has it's own tools. That means redundant development. If they just worked on one set of open source tools, it should reduce development costs. It also opens the door to researchers to try things directly in the mainstream tools. That means not having to re-implement things published in papers, but instead deciding weather or not to merge a feature from a branch.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

> I'm not sure what ChuckMcM was trying to argue. If you create a circuit board which has all of the same chips as someone else, if you've changed the layout, you are completely within your rights to sell it as your own and keep all the money. However, if you copy firmware, then creating a circuit board with the copied firmware is a copyright violation and you can be found guilty of copyright infringement at most of our trading partners. For folks who built cloned CPU boards with a copyrighted BIOS they re-implemented the BIOS in a clean room to have their own "work alike" version, which then gave them the right to sell their boards. If however you copy an FPGA bitstream, which is the compiled output of a copyrighted HDL description, you're in violation. But building a 'clean room' implementation of an FPGA bitstream is generally infeasible as it requires you to both know how the manufacturer encodes and encrypts it, and all of the functions of the internal chip. A really great example of this in action was that the recent flap over "clone" FTDI USB to serial chips, wasn't a clone of the chip at all. Instead the cloners used an ARM M0 CPU with a USB peripheral and a UART peripheral and a bit of code that responded in all of the same ways in which the FTDI chip (which was presumably an ASIC) responded. That 'workalike' implementation was only possible because the set of inputs and outputs for that system are constrained, and the only IP violation was the re-use of FTDI's VID/PID pair. If they had been forced to use a bitstream file for an FPGA they would be liable for up to $30,000 per copy, and jail.

makomk 12y ago

Some people have been preventing cloning by locking their bitstream to the FPGA's unique serial number, which exists partly to allow people to do this. This is trivial to work around if you know the bitstream and device internals.

diamondman 12y ago
I disagree that it is trivial. If we know what bits of the unencrypted bitstream do what, and have a cryptographically secure way of signing the stream, then GLHF with that. If it turns out that documenting the parts of the chip required for configuration makes the black box security not work, then it was crap security and provided no real security to anyone. As it stands there is no way to tell and we have to take the smiling sales guy's word that it is "SUPER secure, promise".