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Comment by Boothroid | Hacker News Reader

I have an iCEstick sitting in a drawer, for which some pretty amazing open source tools are available: http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/

I wish I had the time to play with it!

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I recently tried to buy an iCEStick and failed horribly. Where did you get yours?

Element 14 / Farnell

The fact that you don't is an indication of its true value.

Lattice has gotten some great product placement with recent parts. They have one that is cheap and essential to implementing voice command wake (siri, ok Google). Fpga have huge value for the right applications, but are often low value for individual developers since bring up time is so long.

Hardly, I just have too much else on. Have you any experience with the project?

I got a Xilinx Spartan DEV board sitting in a drawer too. The board is great but Xilinx's tooling has negative value for me, so it'll stay there.

Tooling is 100% the thing keeping FPGAs back.

As far as I can tell, it's an economics problem.

The big consumers of FPGAs don't care if the tooling is terrible, because they're coming from 80s development environments and practices and can afford to dedicate 50-person teams to the job function.

Smaller companies won't touch it because it's terrible, and the vendors won't improve it because there's no demonstrated market for improvements.

Sounds about right. I guess the market economics don't work out for a simple design (i.e. with not much IP revealed by open sourcing the spec) that can be programmed with OS tools. I mean, there's these ICE chips, which is a huge step, but realistically I'd want something just a tiny bit bigger and with a hardcore (ARM or MIPS) in it.

Or maybe the market economics work out, but are small relatively compared to the big players, so it moves glacially.

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