Spartan 6 production through 2030

[chickenHeadKnob]

Scattered in a few threads across the forum, like the chipageddon  thread are concerns about spartan six availability and Xilinx's commitment to continued production.
Well they now announced:https://community.amd.com/t5/adaptive-computing/amd-extends-spartan-6-product-lifecycle-through-at-least-2030/ba-p/610178 

[langwadt]

so I guess ISE will live on even though it was discontinued more than 10 years ago

[nctnico]

It would have been better if they backed it with parts being available... On top of that, AMD has not been very reliable where it comes to part availability in the past. I've been burned a couple of times already by using AMD parts which got sold off and became obsolete.

[SiliconWizard]

Through *at least* 2030. And I'm not surprised. The 6-series has been very popular and I myself have a number of devices using it to support.
ISE works fine on Win 7, requires a VM in Windows 10+ IIRC? But it works fine also on Linux.

[langwadt]

Through *at least* 2030. And I'm not surprised. The 6-series has been very popular and I myself have a number of devices using it to support.
ISE works fine on Win 7, requires a VM in Windows 10+ IIRC? But it works fine also on Linux.

yeh, I think the last windows version comes prepackaged as a vm.

it runs fine on linux or in WSL

[SiliconWizard]

As a side note, I think it's unfortunate that vendors would decide to stop maintaining the software that supports some parts that they still sell and support. That is a problem IMHO.
Either you support a product, or you don't, and the necessary tools to use it are every bit as important as the product itself.
As I said in another thread, it looks like Lattice is gonna do the same thing with Diamond.

I understand that it takes resources to maintain software, but I see little justification from a customer's POV for this kind of decision.

The rationale that the software "just works as it is" is a pretty limited one. You still make customers' life harder - like regarding OS support, and the remaining list of bugs that will never get fixed, etc.
Just MO. If everyone is happy with that, so be it.

[nctnico]

Fixing ISE would mean rewriting it from scratch...  Which Xilinx actually did in the form of Vivado. I just don't quite understand why they didn't add support for Spartan 6 in Vivado. I can't imagine Spartan 6 needing the tools to be completely different due to outlandish FPGA structures inside Spartan 6 FPGAs.

Or maybe people aren't using ISE so much. For the Spartan 6 / Virtex 6 projects I maintain I use Eclipse for editing and a makefile to do the final synthesis runs. I only use ISE for things like looking at timing reports and checking some RTL schematics every now and then.