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| The mess of FPGA development |
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| Mr.Elendig:
--- Quote from: rstofer on March 27, 2019, 07:37:02 pm ---In the bad old days, hobbyists wouldn't even have access to development tools like Vivado. Who would invest $200 million and then give the product away? One of the side effects of being really old is that I remember when static RAM came out and LEDs were a new thing. Along the way there were some neat devices for which I could never afford the tools. They were strictly marketed at manufacturers. From the point of view of support costs, it makes sense to avoid the hobbyists. --- End quote --- Thankfully there are now projects like iCEBreaker and free software stacks for fpga development. (Though with a rather small selection of supported devices) |
| Ice-Tea:
I never really understood why they drop whole device families for new SW. How hard can it be to import all the data in a new SW suite? The data exists. If it is no compatible with the new environment or can be made to be with minimal effort you're not doing it right... Had to run a Spartan II device earlier this year.. I accidently installed the VM version of 14.7 first. Then installed 14.7 "vanilla", wrestled with it for some time to get it running on Win10, figured out II wasn't supported on it and installed 10.0 in the end. Off course, I couldn't get the programmer to work in Win10 so I had to reinstall 14.7 (which I had previously deleted to make room on my poor 256GB SSD...). ... Yeah, you're not alone.. |
| rstofer:
--- Quote from: Mr.Elendig on March 28, 2019, 10:14:49 am --- --- Quote from: rstofer on March 27, 2019, 07:37:02 pm ---In the bad old days, hobbyists wouldn't even have access to development tools like Vivado. Who would invest $200 million and then give the product away? One of the side effects of being really old is that I remember when static RAM came out and LEDs were a new thing. Along the way there were some neat devices for which I could never afford the tools. They were strictly marketed at manufacturers. From the point of view of support costs, it makes sense to avoid the hobbyists. --- End quote --- Thankfully there are now projects like iCEBreaker and free software stacks for fpga development. (Though with a rather small selection of supported devices) --- End quote --- Which just about eliminates using modern devices. Using open source software almost always precludes optimal routing and the use of special features. This just isn't an arena where open source brings anything to the dance. There are a few complainers here but the reality is, Xilinx is giving us access to quality software - FREE! As in it didn't cost a dime! Was I happy when I found ISE crashed on Win 10? Of course not! But 10 minutes later I had it running so what's the big deal? Nothing ever works right out of the box and ISE/Win 10 is one of them. Having spent $200M, how much more should they spend on Vivado to add in obsolete devices for which there is already a free toolchain? Of course they're going to cut the project off. They have coverage for all the devices, they have a more modern toolchain for the current, and more modern, devices yet they still support the older devices. Looks like pretty good coverage to me. Yes, it would be nice to have the ILA with older devices but I didn't have it before and I don't have it now. It's also fair to just change vendors. Altera is looking for customers, maybe it's time to vote with your feet. Meanwhile, I'll stay where I am. ISE and Vivado both work and since I use Digilent boards, I haven't had to worry about whether various device programmers work. I suspect they do but all the current Digilent boards have on-board USB programmers so I'll never find out. Were're talking about FPGA development, the pinnacle of design. And some folks can't find the solution to ISE 14.7 on Win 10 using Google? |
| Ice-Tea:
--- Quote from: rstofer on March 28, 2019, 02:16:47 pm ---Having spent $200M, how much more should they spend on Vivado to add in obsolete devices for which there is already a free toolchain? --- End quote --- Well... --- Quote ---It's also fair to just change vendors. Altera is looking for customers, maybe it's time to vote with your feet. --- End quote --- From a bussiness perspective enough to keep that from happening. And as I mentioned before: how much can it really cost them to port it? I wouldn't even mind if ILA and other whistles and bells weren't supported. |
| cyr:
I've used Xilinx tools since ISE v6.x, and long since learned to accept that FPGA development software just sucks. You learn to live with or work around the obvious bugs, like crashes, "unexpected" errors etc, and hope there aren't any subtle ones that will bite you later. I think it's the natural result of the complexity, niche market, lack of competition and perhaps that FPGA makers just suck at software development? The absolute worst example I remember is the Xilkernel RTOS and related EDK libs. The mistake of actually trying to use that in a product cost quite a lot, and looking at the code while tracking down the bugs really made me wonder about the company that allowed that to be released... Yes, it's free (with source) and probably not developed by the same team that make the FPGA tools but still - these free tools exist in order to sell the chips, and the chips don't do anything useful without the tools. |
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