Where is Open Source for FPGA development?

Many engineers today have Linux on Desktop as main-OS. Many engineers
today use Open Source products because of their quality, stability,
and configurability.

Today I see no alternative to use Xilinx or Alteras Web Packs. Both
are in a very sad state. As Linux or PowerPC user you cannot develop
your FPGA design with this tools. On x86 or on Windows they are very
buggy, slow, and unproductive as well.

So, any idea, how can we change this situation? Will we meet the time
of Open Source development tools for programmable logic devices?

psihodelia@googlemail.com wrote:
> Many engineers today have Linux on Desktop as main-OS. Many engineers
> today use Open Source products because of their quality, stability,
> and configurability.

Hmm, yes, but your many is still a tiny %.
Other are more pragmatic: as long as windows does not get in the
way, they tolerate it.

> 
> Today I see no alternative to use Xilinx or Alteras Web Packs. Both
> are in a very sad state. As Linux or PowerPC user you cannot develop
> your FPGA design with this tools. On x86 or on Windows they are very
> buggy, slow, and unproductive as well.
> 
> So, any idea, how can we change this situation? Will we meet the time
> of Open Source development tools for programmable logic devices?

Full end to end flow tools, probably never.
Xilinx and Altera's engineers are not inept nor incompetent
(tho yes, sometimes users can wonder..) - a large part of their
problem is the continually moving target of their silicon.

Now, if large teams of SW designers, working with in-house
correlation between the Silicon designers, and the SW crew,
struggle to achieve quality, how are OpenSource teams,
without that link, going to achieve - well, much at all ?.

That said, there is plenty of scope for opensouce+FPGA.
opencores / Lattice Mico8 / Mico32 are all examples.

Others are working on various HDL/Sim alternatives, but
back end tools like Map/P&R ? - rather less likely, until
the pace of change slows down.

Plus, the vendors give free tools, so there is not the
price, or sponsored, incentive other open-source targets have.

There probably is scope for users to co-operate more with
the vendors, in raising Sw quality.


As an aside, this made interesting reading
http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=XE4AJV2TYRLWGQSNDLRCKH0CJUNN2JVN?articleID=198500084

-jg






-jg

> Plus, the vendors give free tools, so there is not the
> price, or sponsored, incentive other open-source targets have.

Yes... free tools... with large minimum quantity provisioning contract for 
anything besides economy/entry-level parts - Quartus Web/ISE Webpack only 
support Cyclone/Spartan FPGAs and small Stratix/Virtex devices. For small 
customers, the full Quartus/ISE usually costs a few grands.

While it would certainly be nice to have open-source tools to support FPGA 
development (more options is almost always good for those days where 
ISE&all keep on crashing and burning), the rather small world-wide pool of 
FPGA people with both the programming knowledge and motivation to build and 
maintain this sort of project as volunteers is, unfortunately, almost 
certainly far too small.

There are incentives to having independent tools such as avoiding 
XST/PAR/MAP bugs by replacing the whole tool chain... but the magnitude and 
complexity of such a project goes beyond what I believe can be expected 
from volunteer work. Whether or not the gains would offset the effort is a 
subjective matter but odds are mostly against it for the foreseeable future 
as you said.

Who knows, maybe some FPGA vendor will open-source their tools some day and 
get the ball rolling.

Daniel S. wrote:

>> Plus, the vendors give free tools, so there is not the
>> price, or sponsored, incentive other open-source targets have.
> 
> 
> Yes... free tools... with large minimum quantity provisioning contract 
> for anything besides economy/entry-level parts - Quartus Web/ISE Webpack 
> only support Cyclone/Spartan FPGAs and small Stratix/Virtex devices. For 
> small customers, the full Quartus/ISE usually costs a few grands.


True, but I did notice Altera is has decided to make the Entire Cyclone 
III for free :

PR:
"Quartus II software version 7.0 provides industry-leading performance 
and productivity features to support the new Cyclone III family, 
including the EP3C120 device with 120,000 LEs, 4 Mbits of memory and 288 
multipliers�the highest-device density available in any FPGA vendor�s 
free software package."

Q: So how many NIOS cores could fit in this device ?

-jg

psihodelia@googlemail.com wrote:
> Many engineers today have Linux on Desktop as main-OS. Many engineers
> today use Open Source products because of their quality, stability,
> and configurability.
> 
> Today I see no alternative to use Xilinx or Alteras Web Packs. Both
> are in a very sad state. As Linux or PowerPC user you cannot develop
> your FPGA design with this tools. On x86 or on Windows they are very
> buggy, slow, and unproductive as well.
> 
> So, any idea, how can we change this situation? Will we meet the time
> of Open Source development tools for programmable logic devices?
> 

This is a mix of two different things - running tools in an open source 
environment, and open-source tools.

For a number of reasons, it is unlikely that we will see open source 
toolsets that cover the whole range of FPGA design.  In particular, 
placing, routing and timing are so tied in with the hardware, and so 
specialised, that there are few people in the world who are capable of 
writing such software that are not already working for an FPGA company. 
  Open source is not an appropriate development model for such software.

Other parts of the toolset are a different matter.  There are a number 
of open source HDLs, such as MyHDL or confluence, which are at a level 
above Verilog or VHDL.  There are open source synthesisers, compilers, 
interpreters and simulators (such as Icarus and GHDL).  There are also, 
of course, open source hardware designs (look at www.opencores.org for 
examples).

When it comes to running closed source fpga software in open source 
environments, however, it's a different matter.  Both X and A toolkits 
rely very heavily on open source software.  As far as I can see (and I'm 
sure I'll be corrected if I've got it wrong), Quartus is build around a 
few closed source binaries, a gui, a large collection of open source 
glue such as cygwin, perl, and tcl/tk, and scripts written in these 
languages.  For the binaries doing the hard work, it should make little 
difference which OS they run on.  The infrastructure, written in perl 
and tcl (and perhaps other languages too), Linux or another *nix would 
be a far more natural OS than windows.  About the only part that is 
actually tied to windows is the gui.

What is needed for a more open-source friendly Quartus (and presumably 
the same applies to ISE), is two things.  First, drop the proprietary 
closed-source kit used to run the win32 gui on linux (this is, I 
believe, the main reason why there is no free version of Q on Linux). 
Either re-write the gui using one of the many cross-platform toolkits 
available (such as Qt, GTK, or wxWidgets), or make the gui run with wine 
or winelib on Linux (that would avoid major re-writing).  Secondly, drop 
the requirement for particular distributions, and replace it with a 
simple requirements for minimum versions of the infrastructure like perl 
and tcl.  In these days of virtual machines, it should be a simple 
matter to set up automated testing on a dozen different distributions, 
and if your code works on Red Hat, Suse, Debian, and Ubuntu, then it 
will work on almost anything.

Personally, I don't think there would be any benefit in the critical 
tools themselves being open source, and have no problem with the idea of 
a free version supporting the low-end families and paying for support 
for the high-end families.  I don't do much fpga work at the moment - I 
do mostly embedded software development.  As with most professionals in 
the field, I am happy to pay for quality tools - but I would prefer 
greater choice in how I run these tools.

<psihodelia@googlemail.com> wrote in message 
news:1174871961.121540.72100@d57g2000hsg.googlegroups.com...
> Today I see no alternative to use Xilinx or Alteras Web Packs. Both
> are in a very sad state. As Linux or PowerPC user you cannot develop
> your FPGA design with this tools. On x86 or on Windows they are very
> buggy, slow, and unproductive as well.

Strange... last time I looked, Xilinx provided full support for Linux as a 
host environment, even with the free WebPack software. True, it's only on 
x86. But if there was a great demand for e.g. Mac software for FPGA 
development, I'm sure FPGA vendors would at least think about providing it.

Personally I can't see FPGA vendors going completely open-source with their 
tool development - they have too much "secret sauce" tied up in their 
back-end algorithms. Still, it's not hard to imagine a more open approach 
than what we have at the moment...

        -Ben- 

On a sunny day (Mon, 26 Mar 2007 10:48:36 +0200) it happened David Brown
<david@westcontrol.removethisbit.com> wrote in
<4607844a$0$31544$8404b019@news.wineasy.se>:

>What is needed for a more open-source friendly Quartus (and presumably 
>the same applies to ISE), is two things.  First, drop the proprietary 
>closed-source kit used to run the win32 gui on linux (this is, I 
>believe, the main reason why there is no free version of Q on Linux). 
>Either re-write the gui using one of the many cross-platform toolkits 
>available (such as Qt, GTK, or wxWidgets), or make the gui run with wine 
>or winelib on Linux (that would avoid major re-writing).

What are you talking about?
Quatus II 5.1 GUI running in wine-0.9.9 in Linux right now!
And the Linux version of webpack works too.

<psihodelia@googlemail.com> wrote in message 
news:1174871961.121540.72100@d57g2000hsg.googlegroups.com...
> Many engineers today have Linux on Desktop as main-OS. Many engineers
> today use Open Source products because of their quality, stability,
> and configurability.
>
> Today I see no alternative to use Xilinx or Alteras Web Packs. Both
> are in a very sad state. As Linux or PowerPC user you cannot develop
> your FPGA design with this tools. On x86 or on Windows they are very
> buggy, slow, and unproductive as well.
>
> So, any idea, how can we change this situation? Will we meet the time
> of Open Source development tools for programmable logic devices?
>
I guess if more people donate more of their own time and effort to the FOSS 
effort for FPGAs, the situation might change. I'm curious as to how much 
effort you have contributed. ;-)
Cheers, Syms. 

On Mar 26, 3:48 am, Jim Granville <no.s...@designtools.maps.co.nz>
wrote:
> psihode...@googlemail.com wrote:
> > Many engineers today have Linux on Desktop as main-OS. Many engineers
> > today use Open Source products because of their quality, stability,
> > and configurability.
>
> Hmm, yes, but your many is still a tiny %.
> Other are more pragmatic: as long as windows does not get in the
> way, they tolerate it.

I had a different impression.
In the ASIC EDA world until a few years ago the Windows market share
was about 0%.
It is a little higher now but most of the tools still do not support
windows.

Of course there are a lot more FPGA designs done than ASIC designs and
the number
of licenses sold/given away for FPGA tools outnumbers the ASIC
licenses by orders of magnitude,
but a lot of the algorithms used in FPGA tools are developed with ASIC
EDA money.
As an example Magma Design Automation paid something like 150
developers having less than a
hundred customers. (Very inaccurate and old numbers, but you get the
point.)

I soubt that the EDA user community is large enough to spin off a
enough developers to get anything useful
done. See for example how hard it is to get a working open source IP
community together and that should be
a lot easier.
Other successfull Open Source projects are either a lot easier than
EDA or have a marge larger user base to
draw developers from.

However what can be done, is the development of additional vendor
independant tools that complement the major
tools as well as replacing parts of the tool chain. One example on the
fringe of EDA is Octave as a replacement for
Matlab. Antoher one is a recent paper on a GI workshop that show how
easy it is to extend the synthesizable
subset of VHDL. They presented a VHDL to VHDL preprocessor that
allowed you to use more constructs in your
synthesizable code than Synopsys supports. Yet another example are
timing diagram editors for documentation.

Smaller projects like these are much more likely to yield high quality
results than aiming for a complete toolchain.
Also, they remain useful once they are not developed actively anymore.
A backend tool would become useless as soon
as development can not match the pace of the introduction of new
architectures.

Kolja Sulimma
(I did EDA research for years)

Jan Panteltje wrote:
> On a sunny day (Mon, 26 Mar 2007 10:48:36 +0200) it happened David Brown
> <david@westcontrol.removethisbit.com> wrote in
> <4607844a$0$31544$8404b019@news.wineasy.se>:
> 
>> What is needed for a more open-source friendly Quartus (and presumably 
>> the same applies to ISE), is two things.  First, drop the proprietary 
>> closed-source kit used to run the win32 gui on linux (this is, I 
>> believe, the main reason why there is no free version of Q on Linux). 
>> Either re-write the gui using one of the many cross-platform toolkits 
>> available (such as Qt, GTK, or wxWidgets), or make the gui run with wine 
>> or winelib on Linux (that would avoid major re-writing).
> 
> What are you talking about?
> Quatus II 5.1 GUI running in wine-0.9.9 in Linux right now!

I am sure it works (I have not tried it - as I say, I haven't done much 
fpga work for a while), but the only "official" Altera way to run 
Quartus on Linux is the paid version, running on a few specific choices 
of distribution.  Since your experience proves that Quartus runs fine 
under wine, what is needed is for Altera to say so, and to provide 
instructions and relevant install scripts for their web edition.

> And the Linux version of webpack works too.
> 

I have heard that the Xilinx Linux webpack uses the same commercial 
win32 wrapper, and that Xilinx in fact have to pay a royalty fee for 
each Linux webpack that is downloaded.  I don't know whether this is 
fact or rumour - again, I hope someone will correct me if I'm wrong.