Is the code on an FPGA firmware?

[suicidaleggroll]

You write firmware.  After it's been synthesized, you load the bitstream onto the FPGA.  That's the syntax I use...the code itself is "firmware" or "HDL", the synthesized binary blob is the bitstream, though many people I work with still refer to that as the firmware, and nobody cares.

[jnz]

I mean, I don't know the second thing about FPGA really, but it seems to me you're just defining a *configuration*.

In terms of the real world firmware seems about a million times clearer to a normal person than bitstream.

[ZaneKaminski]

Once it's on the FPGA, it is certainly not a bitstream. The bits all end up scattered around in different internal flipflops and SRAM blocks. There is no stream anymore. So it's a "configuration" now, not a bitstream. A bitstream is just that... a stream of bits. In this case, the bitstream encodes the FPGA configuration.

Firmware is a more abstract concept. Firmware is the stuff you have to apply to the device or it doesn't work. I hesitate to provide a more specific definition, since more specificity would undermine the usefulness of the term. Firmware doesn't have to be a single bitstream, though it often is. It could be multiple, or it could refer to some other way to structure the data. Consider multiple files in a typical computer filesystem. These files could, together, represent the firmware, but they have tree-type relationship and aren't just a single stream (a tree of streams, of course).

So if all a system needs to "work" (whatever that means) is an FPGA configuration bitstream, then it represents the entirety of the firmware. Otherwise there may be other files or bistreams or whatever you want to say, and those all together represent the firmware.

Addendum: it's worth noting that the firmware doesn't have to be compiled, whereas a bitstream (like the software  term, a "binary") always is compiled and ready to run or be applied to the device.

[legacy]

mr.brilliant: hey?
mr.sapiens: oh!
mr.brilliant: pip?
mr.sapiens: and dandy!
mr.brilliant: yeah! let's upload the firmware
mr.sapiens: yeah cool!!!!!!!!

5 sec later ... some neurons have a blast
 
mr.sapiens: ehm ... what? into what? we have two CPUs and four fpgas on the board
mr.brilliant: ye-e-ah, I meant the file-something for the chip-something
mr.sapiens: which one? the slave MPU? the ARM chip? do you mean loooooonnnniiiixxxxx?
mr.brilliant: it! (pointing the finger in the direction of the chip)
mr.sapiens: ah, that chip, that file!!! Alright!

---

The ape was a great big Hit!
The first time it said "banana",
pointing the finger in the direction
of a banana on a banana tree.

Nowadays problems with evolution
are greater still 

( kidding )