Electronics > Beginners
The mess of FPGA development
Bassman59:
--- Quote from: Ice-Tea on March 28, 2019, 04:24:36 pm ---
--- Quote from: rstofer on March 28, 2019, 04:17:16 pm ---Not really! Real, paid, designers will always pick the latest and greatest chip because they don't want to design into an end-of-life situation. Their bosses would worry greatly about obsolescence.
--- End quote ---
Please. Plenty of markets that can't support the respin of a board or won't tolerate changing a resistor before requalifying or going through acceptance again for the entire product. I *am* a real, paid engineer and I have learned a long time ago that going for the most shiny new toy isn't always the best solution. FPGA lifecycles tend to be a *lot* longer than, say, consumer HW. For fun and giggles I checked on Digikey: Spartan II parts are shown as active.
--- End quote ---
Another real paid engineer here. We split the difference.
On one hand, we do relatively low-volume long-lifetime products, so the need to support older devices is always there. This means most of us run Windows 7, and we have ISE 14.7 installed next to Vivado. There are a few Windows 10 installs, but the move to that platform is painful for reasons beyond supporting older FPGA tools. Nobody likes it when Windows decides it must install a patch and reboot, borking an overnight experiment. I have a CentOS disk in my machine and can boot it and run the tools on it and at some point that will be my main set-up. (Maybe sooner rather than later if those rumors of Altium running on Linux come true.)
On the other hand, for new designs, we look ahead to what is entering mainstream now. What's the newest device we can buy from DigiKey or Mouser? (Not that we always buy from them, but they're a pretty good indicator of not-huge quantity availability.)
On the gripping hand, if an older design needs a board refresh, we'll look to see whether it makes sense to change to a newer FPGA device. Usually, we don't.
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My current project is based on an FPGA device which has been qualified for the operating environment. The vendor's most-recent tools release no longer supports that device family. We have started conversations with the customer about this. Will they do a last-time buy and stockpile the parts? Will they want to qualify that vendor's newer devices? Will they get assurances from the vendor about availability? Lots of questions, no good answers.
Bassman59:
--- Quote from: rstofer on March 28, 2019, 04:17:16 pm ---Not really! Real, paid, designers will always pick the latest and greatest chip because they don't want to design into an end-of-life situation. Their bosses would worry greatly about obsolescence.
--- End quote ---
Also, real paid designers don't give a shit about "FPGA boards." We don't use them, we don't care about them, so whether the latest version of the toolset supports an old board is not important. We just design the devices into our product's boards and go.
0culus:
--- Quote from: Bassman59 on March 28, 2019, 05:04:18 pm ---
--- Quote from: rstofer on March 28, 2019, 04:17:16 pm ---Not really! Real, paid, designers will always pick the latest and greatest chip because they don't want to design into an end-of-life situation. Their bosses would worry greatly about obsolescence.
--- End quote ---
Also, real paid designers don't give a shit about "FPGA boards." We don't use them, we don't care about them, so whether the latest version of the toolset supports an old board is not important. We just design the devices into our product's boards and go.
--- End quote ---
Exactly...the boards you buy from Intel/Altera, Digilent, etc. are for tinkering. I seriously doubt any of them are used in a serious production device.
BTW, nice username, I have one of those amps. :-+
james_s:
Most of the dev boards are targeted at university students. I've seen them used in professional settings in the proof of concept stages or one-off devices for in-house use but they wouldn't be integrated into a product.
I don't really know what the big deal is here though. I use old devices with old tools, so what? If it won't run on Win10 that's because Win10 is a turd, I wouldn't bother updating older software to work on it either, especially when there is a native Linux version.
rsjsouza:
--- Quote from: Ice-Tea on March 28, 2019, 02:54:37 pm ---And as I mentioned before: how much can it really cost them to port it?
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The dilemma of removing support from latest revisions of software is not new nor restricted to a single company. The cost of maintaining support is largely due to testing, which tends to become more and more difficult over the years where development boards or devices become proportionally more expensive (when compared to newer generations) and less interesting financially (less incoming money from customers as newer devices replace older generations).
Also, the time where frameworks are changed is the time to make the hardest decisions regarding support. I don't know Xilinx tools very well, but it seems to me the older generations were dropped when the framework that comprised the ISE software was dropped in favour of the newer one (Vivado?). Customers tend to understand such decisions better when there is a major revision of the support software.
There is also the development intricacies: not everything can be easily ported across frameworks. Sometimes things that were developed for a full custom IDE (typical of the 1990s and 2000s) are not easily absorbed by, say, Eclipse or Netbeans. The decision then becomes a very pragmatic one: what can be ported with the allotted money and before the deadline to release device "X"?
--- Quote from: Ice-Tea on March 28, 2019, 02:54:37 pm ---I wouldn't even mind if ILA and other whistles and bells weren't supported.
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IME this does not work. The confusion created when the new framework has only partial support for specific devices is a big frustration maker and a support burden. Not to say it doesn't happen with newer generations, but any efforts to minimize this with less profitable product lines is certainly a huge benefit.
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