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I hope the develop open and cheap compilation tools to force xilinx to do the same.
by aswanson 11y ago
I hope the develop open and cheap compilation tools to force xilinx to do the same.
- bjackman 11y agoI believe the Xilinx tools are actually free of cost. Still, though, open source FPGA tools are desperately needed. edit: even if they just opened up the bitfile format. I believe it's a similar situation as GPU instructions sets though: managers saying "no because patents".
- cottonseed 11y agoI recently wrote a place and route tool for Lattice iCE40 FPGAs [0]. The bitstream was reverse engineered by Clifford Wolf and others as part of the IceStorm project [1]. We're using Yosys [2] for Verilog synthesis, also written by Clifford. [0] https://github.com/cseed/arachne-pnr https://github.com/cseed/arachne-pnr [1] http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/ http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/ [2] http://www.clifford.at/yosys/ http://www.clifford.at/yosys/
- FullyFunctional 11y agoWow, that is pretty awesome. I didn't expect this to have arrived that quickly. Does it support user constraints on relative placement (and routing)? Self-timed logic, such as NULL Convention Logic [1], doesn't fit well with the synchronous FPGA paradigm, but can be implement on those if the feedback loops are tightly controlled [2]. I'd like to play with that :) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_circuit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_circuit http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Asynchronous-Circuits-Convention-Synthesis/dp/1598299816 [2] http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=5438673&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D5438673 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=543867...
- cottonseed 11y agoWhoa, I had no idea you could do async circuits on an FPGA (although I can't get to [2] right now, the site is under maintenance). Right now, I only support IO constraints. The IceStorm project hasn't documented the timing model yet but it is in pipeline. Is it possible to do what you want with vendor tools? Anyways, email me and we can chat about what you'd need.
- tcas 11y agoXilinx tools are only free for certain chips and feature sets. If you want tools like ChipScope (which more than pays for itself) or to use any Vertex chips you need to buy their software. For their lower end chips (All the Spartan series, the larger of the 6 series are still quite useful) they straight up announced an end of development on the main toolchain (ISE) with no plans for support on their newer one.
- enos_feedler 11y agoOpening up the spec alone is not ideal, and its not just for the patents. Hardware validation of a software spec is expensive. Today they don't need to do that. They can simply change the software to work around broken hardware and nobody needs to know.
- niklasni1 11y agoI hope the same, but it's not likely in the short term. Intel seems to understand open better than a lot of hardware companies, but it's still got its share of NDAs. And a proprietary compiler AFAIK.
- zvrba 11y agoHardly. They're not even giving away their optimizing compiler for their own CPUs; you have to pay for it for commercial use.
- minthd 11y agoGiven that FPGA dev tools are much harder to develop than FPGA chips(at that company scale), i don't think intel will open them.
- fnordfnordfnord 11y agoI don't understand the logic there. No FPGA vendor will ever turn a profit on their EDA-ware, and nobody would ever buy an FPGA without it. Open the stuff up and let people do some of the heavy lifting. They can still sell value-added bits and bobs if the want, and can concentrate on usability, something they sorely need to do.
- minthd 11y agoIn business - "the hard part" == "competitive advantage" . If you open source that , soon you'll see more competitors knocking on your doors. For example, if intel wanted, it could have built a decent FPGA, probably in a reasonable time(there were startups that built decent fpga's). But building good fpga software ? that it couldn't do, first because it's really hard and second because you need tens of thousands of designs from your customers to run on this in ordered to make good software. That's not something acquirable.
- aswanson 11y agoBut whatever level of advantage they have here now is negated by xilinxes existence of a toolset with roughly that level of engineering effort. So why not, in the least, consider damaging the only true competition by opening up?
- anderspitman 11y agoYes we can hope. That would be awesome