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Comment by davemp | Hacker News Reader

This is ignoring the major part of hardware development that is actually just non-free software tooling.

This whole thread is frankly, so dumb. One of my best friends is a SoC designer at Apple and we talk about this stuff all the time.

First thing people need to understand: this whole world operates at scale. You don't bother making an ASIC unless you really need one -- you're either making millions/hundreds of millions of them, or the individual application is so high-value that the hassle, complexity, and expense of moving off a general-purpose CPU onto something completely custom is worth it.

Second, 4K is chump change. You need an entire team of people to do anything meaningful with FPGAs/ASICs. Less than that, just buy a $100 CPU that will do more, be immediately available, and have an entire software stack (OS, user-space programs, compilers, etc) for it. And teams that know how to build this stuff well cost MONEY. A lot of it. Not $100K/year. More like $250-300K minimum per person at Silicon Valley rates.

I get that the OP wants to do this as a sort of hobbyist undertaking, just realize, he's cutting against the grain of the entire ecosystem. Everything about this stuff is made for huge companies to do massive projects that will ship at gargantuan scale. Not hobbyists in a garage.

The major part of hardware development is NOT tooling. It is manufacturing the hardware.

Nice perspective taking. To the OP's defense, he was wondering about FPGAs for hobby endeavors.

> this whole world operates at scale. You don't bother making an ASIC unless you really need one

You are the first person in this thread about FPGAs to mention making an ASIC.

His point still stands as all the tooling and IPs are the same for FPGA and ASIC and ASIC drives developement of new IPs and tools. FPGA are still the minor market here by far

> * all the tooling and IPs are the same for FPGA and ASIC*

They're really, really not.

Place and route tool is different and IPs might use different memory and multiplier macros depending on technology. Serdes transceives will also be different. Ideally this is all hidden from the integrator by parameter selecting technology.

Linting tools, simulation tools, formal verification and synthesis tools are all the same. Verification methodology is also the same.

I disagree with this, you don't necessarily need a whole team of people and massive amounts of cash to do FPGA development and you don't necessarily need expensive tools. For my current company I created a complete FPGA based trading system from scratch on my own with free tools (apart from Vivado which I just used to turn my RTL into an actual design I could put onto the FPGA board). The board I used cost around £2k and the Vivado tools were £4k (athough if I was going to do it again, it appears you can just pay for your usage of Vivado using the cloud (nimbix has machines that have the Vivado suite on them). The cost to the company for this is pretty much my salary + the board costs.

Tooling is a blip on the radar of the cost of the designs I work on. Verification is usually the most expensive aspect. 10x tooling even if the tools were purchased for, that project alone, which would be very unusual.

However, for open source to flourish, high quality open source simulators are required. I think if we had that, synthesis and place&route would follow. You don't need synthesis or par to do design and verification, but you do need simulation.

I look into the state of OS simulators periodically. Some are impressive, but mostly just handle the design basics... an OS systemverilog, static and dynamic, simulator would be a game changer.

It's a Herculean task though. I don't know how much Xilinx makes off tooling. I have to think they would make more from FPGA sales if tooling were free, and if it were open source, it would no doubt be improved upon by degrees I can only fantasize about.

Simulators, and by extension synthesis and place & route tools, are complementary goods to FPGA hardware. Make your complementary goods cheap, and you make a lot of money.

But there are tool companies out there such as Mentor and Synopsys that make a lot of money from such proprietary tooling. I imagine simulators have a tough patent field to navigate.

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