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Comment by aswanson | Hacker News Reader

I hope the develop open and cheap compilation tools to force xilinx to do the same.

I 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".

I 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

[1] http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/

[2] http://www.clifford.at/yosys/

Wow, 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://www.amazon.com/Designing-Asynchronous-Circuits-Convention-Synthesis/dp/1598299816

[2] http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=543867...

Whoa, 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.

Xilinx 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.

Opening 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.

I 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.

Hardly. They're not even giving away their optimizing compiler for their own CPUs; you have to pay for it for commercial use.

Given that FPGA dev tools are much harder to develop than FPGA chips(at that company scale), i don't think intel will open them.

I 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.

In 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.

But 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?

Life in a duopoly is great . Why change things ?

Touche...

Why does any company make open source software, then? WebKit, Android, OpenGL, and OpenCV (Intel) are certainly hard to develop.

OSS development has proven to be a useful tool as part of greater business models.

If we look at WebKit, And OpenCV and i think OpenGL , the software is really a complement to the real business and are less hard to develop than the main products.Also they are all in the API business - where developers demand open source and have enough power .

As for android - Again it was a strategic necessity for Google, since it needed that distribution point for it's huge ad business. Operating systems are a winner takes all business and the most effective, lowest risk strategy to get there was open sourcing, even though it's kind of a loss leader. And even with only partially open-sourcing android , Google is at constant risk of losing control of android.

The situation in FPGA is different - if altera opens the tool, xilinx and other companies will probably use it , and we'll probably see multiple companies compete on the business.

"Compiling" for a FPGA is far harder than your regular processor compiling, where you "just" translate your high level code to machine code.

Here is a link that explains the process: http://curtis.io/others-work/open-tooling-for-fpgas

Right, I understand. Logic synthesis entails constraint solving and other big domain-specific challenges. It is a very difficult problem. (So are web rendering, OS development, graphics API design, and computer vision.)

Yes we can hope. That would be awesome

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