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Comment by mikewarot | Hacker News Reader

I've been strongly interested in computational fabrics for at least 15 years... this looks interesting, but very, very locked down.

It is my understanding that FPGA vendors have fought the open source community every step of the way. I would hate to see the future of computing locked up in a new spiffy prison.

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FPGAs have ITAR restrictions which might be an issue with open sourcing the tools.

That could get you to a proper prison?

In what way is it locked down ? I guess the FPGA may be big enough that it isn't covered by the free version of the Vivado toolchain.

Isn’t Vivado entirely proprietary?

How does that prevent you from making use of the product described in the article ?

That comment was made in the context of a thread about open source FPGA development tools.

And I'm questioning whether lack of open source FPGA development tools means that the device is "locked down". You can do everything that the device is designed to be able to do.

That's true for any locked down device. An iPhone can do everything it is designed to do yet it could also do so much more if it weren't locked down.

Ok, I understand now. It is locked down because it is locked down.

Yes, and it is also a bug riddled mess that is prone to synthesis errors. I am hoping maybe the AMD acquisition will encourage them to open more things up to get more eyes on the synthesis flow and allow more recourse/debugging when issues are encountered.

What synthesis errors have you run into?

Random ones requiring keep attributes for no reason on larger designs to keep stuff from being inferred away erroneously. Certain issues with limitations on SV interfaces only supporting constructs used in the "IP integration" scripting as opposed to the full language spec. I am sorry if I came off as overly negative, but I really think the FOSS EDA tools are going to lap them unless they open up somewhat.

(I am also biased because the designs I work on are small enough that ECP and presumably upcoming Lattice FPGAs are plenty. I am excited by the Xilinx reverse engineering efforts, too. But there seems to be less official interest than we see with Lattice in supporting the OSS efforts.)

I agree that just about all of the EDA tools are a pretty terrible experience.

I’ve gotten tired of dealing with quirks using SV interfaces in RTL. I’m using structs as a substitute at the moment.

keep in mind that "locked down" doesn't necessarily mean "free vs paid" but possibly "open source vs proprietary"

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