Altium's LiveDesign & IP for FPGA design

[blipton]

Not much new information (post 2005) on Altium's site about LiveDesign/NanoBoard3000...   Anyone know if Altium Designer has generic FPGA IPs that can target any hardware?   

The reason I ask, is that the little bit of information I've seen on LiveDesign, suggests that the FPGA designs created in Altium can be debugged real-time with a "LiveDesign-enabled platform" like the Nanoboard3000.   

I understand Dave designed the nb3000, and I'm sure it's great, but it's a cyclone 3, and there's many cheaper, newer fpga development boards out there for the starting newbie. I'm really interested in playing with the IPs, however if the Altium software licensing has restrictions on the platform, or requires a nb hardware dongle, or development on the IPs has discontinued,  perhaps it's best to look into something else.. any suggestions?

[EEVblog]

Yep, look elsewhere. Altum has all but abandoned FPGA and hardware. They'll tell you they haven't, but that's just to save face because they invested hundreds of millions of dollars into a black hole.

[m4l490n]

Why do you say it is a black hole?

I think that is really helpful to have everything in a EDA software that allows you to have the power of platform independence and the best of all is that all that IP they provide to design very complete products really quick. I know is not perfect but with more time this could be a really good feature.

[EEVblog]

I know is not perfect but with more time this could be a really good feature.

That is the point. They spent 12 years and the entire company fortune on the FPGA dream (at the expense of basic PCB/SCH stuff people want), and what have they got to show for it?
Yes, a nice jazzy front end that can be made to kinda work really well to impress people, but do anything more serious and the system falls apart. Device support is hopeless and they would have been forever chasing their own tail. It is an ever spiraling black hole. FPGA should be left to the vendor tools (which Altium use anyway), but have pin swap and other PCB level FPGA support.
Thankfully the new management have seen the fruitlessness of this and are focusing on core SCH/PCB stuff again. They have now all but abandoned the FPGA stuff.

[tszaboo]

Why do you say it is a black hole?

I think that is really helpful to have everything in a EDA software that allows you to have the power of platform independence and the best of all is that all that IP they provide to design very complete products really quick. I know is not perfect but with more time this could be a really good feature.

OK, let's say it works, and you are platform independent.
Then you depend on Altium.
Good thing, it doesn't work.

[EEVblog]

OK, let's say it works, and you are platform independent.

You aren't.
Altium totally relies upon and uses the FPGA vendor tools underneath.

[m4l490n]

a nice jazzy front end that can be made to kinda work really well to impress people, but do anything more serious and the system falls apart. Device support is hopeless and they would have been forever chasing their own tail.

  I'm worried because I'm planning to start doing some designs for a company as freelancer, they are not very complex at the moment and I could say that by now is some sort of a "demo" or "proof of concept". But eventually I'm planning to enhance this designs and make a full product. The thing here is that with altium I have all this IP for things like monitors, USB keyboard and mouse, ethernet, UART, SPI, I2C, SD Cards, etc and I don't think I could find such a solution with all that IP without extra cost from the vendors.

  Actually, in my previous job we were working with a custom board design with altium and other team with altera tools. The other team didn't find the IP for VGA monitor and SPI bus and we at the "altium" team did that very easily with the integrated IP, we had the solution effortlessly and worked really good. That caught my attention and make me fall in love with altium because along with the SCH/PCB design we were able to design also the FPGA part. As I'm starting I don't have thousandths of dollars to spend on IP and that is why the Altium approach seems appealing.

Those were not very complex designs and everything worked really well and I'd like you to give me please some examples when you refer to system falling apart with serious projects. And speaking about falling apart, what about all those companies listed under "Customer Success" at the Altium Site? I haven't read all of the success criteria but, isn't any success story with FPGA design?

Thank you very much for the information, I hope you can help me to clarify all this because I'm about to start and I don't want to find myself in the middle of a black hole with a project at hand with no support and a failed FPGA system.

[EEVblog]

  I'm worried because I'm planning to start doing some designs for a company as freelancer, they are not very complex at the moment and I could say that by now is some sort of a "demo" or "proof of concept". But eventually I'm planning to enhance this designs and make a full product. The thing here is that with altium I have all this IP for things like monitors, USB keyboard and mouse, ethernet, UART, SPI, I2C, SD Cards, etc and I don't think I could find such a solution with all that IP without extra cost from the vendors.

Try http://opencores.org/
I find it hard to believe you won't be able to find all the common IP you need for free.

Those were not very complex designs and everything worked really well and I'd like you to give me please some examples when you refer to system falling apart with serious projects.

Go read the Altium forums and you'll find countless examples.
Try designing for the latest FPGA chips and see how far you get.
Or better yet, go ask the professional using the tool on the Altium forum and see what they have to say. Very few professional would dare commit to using Altium as their core FPGA development tool.

And speaking about falling apart, what about all those companies listed under "Customer Success" at the Altium Site? I haven't read all of the success criteria but, isn't any success story with FPGA design?

That's just quote mining.
99% of Altium customers don't touch the FPGA tools (a real number BTW, Altium officially admit only "over 90%"), but they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the FPGA dream, and it's a huge part of the marketing, so what do they do? They go out and find a couple of customers who actually found the FPGA tool useful for their specific circumstances, get them to say how wonderful it is, and plaster it all over the website.
Go through and try to find how many of those customers actually use the FPGA tool...
Remember Altium deliberately bundled the FPGA tools with the core PCB/SCH tool long ago. If they didn't do that no one would buy the FPGA tools and it would have been dropped a long time ago.

If you don't believe me that Altium are not focussed on FPGA support any more, just go read their company reports about what they are focussed on now.
http://www.altium.com/resources/investor_announcement/asx_releases/ASX_Announcement_Altium_Investor_Presentation_FY2014.pdf

Thank you very much for the information, I hope you can help me to clarify all this because I'm about to start and I don't want to find myself in the middle of a black hole with a project at hand with no support and a failed FPGA system.

Odds are you will.
Check which FPGA's Altium actually supports, I bet you'll have trouble even finding a list.

[Bassman59]

  Actually, in my previous job we were working with a custom board design with altium and other team with altera tools. The other team didn't find the IP for VGA monitor and SPI bus and we at the "altium" team did that very easily with the integrated IP, we had the solution effortlessly and worked really good. That caught my attention and make me fall in love with altium because along with the SCH/PCB design we were able to design also the FPGA part. As I'm starting I don't have thousandths of dollars to spend on IP and that is why the Altium approach seems appealing.

FPGA guy and Altium user here.

I'm not sure what sort of IP you're using in your designs, but VGA and SPI are trivial, and I wouldn't even bother looking for someone else's "IP Core."  Rather than trying to adapt someone else's core, you can write your own, and make it meet your needs exactly, instead of having something that has a ton of generics and such to make it, well, generic.

And it's great fun having to implement, say, a Wishbone or other wacky bus master to talk to that open-source SPI core. I mean, extra work, right?

There seems to be this notion that FPGA design should be reduced to picking IP cores out of a catalog and placing them into a design. I'm sure the FPGA vendors like that approach, because they can sell chips to the non-FPGA folks. None of my designs have been this sort of cookie-cutter thing, and I'm sure I'm not the exception.

Count me as one of the many FPGA guys who looked at Altium's FPGA tools and asked, "Why bother?" There are better text editors than Altium's. You need to use the vendor synthesis and place-and-route tools. Nobody does a schematic top-level with HDL lower-level entities, so that excuse to use Altium's tools for FPGAs goes away.

And why bother indeed, especially when using those tools ties up a license that someone else could otherwise use for schematic capture and layout?

It was a solution in search of a problem.