Where is Open Source for FPGA development?

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psihodelia@googlemail.com wrote:

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

If things are not appearing to your satisfaction there are two clear
ways to get what you're after:

Method A: Get off your duff and do it! There are those of us who
spend a *lot* of time working the issue who get a touch annoyed
when armchair engineers come up with blue-sky declarations.

Method B: Pay someone to do it! Yes, open source software is *paid*
for, either with volunteer effort (Heard the term "opportunity cost"
in your ECON 101 course?) or, increasingly these days, with real
money from entities with an interest in open source versions of
of valuable products.


- --
Steve Williams                "The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
steve at icarus.com           But I have promises to keep,
http://www.icarus.com         and lines to code before I sleep,
http://www.picturel.com       And lines to code before I sleep."
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On Mar 25, 11:11 pm, "Daniel S."
<digitalmastrmind_no_s...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Actually, many of the large open source projects are full time staffed
by industry
giants ... for example many of the linux developers have a day job
maintaining
linux for their respective empoyer's hardware platforms ... in IBM,
SUN, HP,
etc ... while also having hat's as core developers in various distro's
as a paid
job. Much of the integration and testing of distro's is also funded
day work, via
contracts ... it's how RedHat engineers get paid.

This is big business, not just volunteer work. The hardware interfaces
into computers
and not "just easy" pieces of code to develop and maintain, and are
loaded with heavy
IP rights ... just like the internal chip interfaces for FPGA's. The
difference is, that
software developers took those interfaces public with open source
operating systems.

If it can work for operating systems and major distro's ... then it
can work in other
industries where there is leadership in open source to obtain
advantages for both
the Corporations and their customers.  So far, Xilinx and Altera are
not taking that
lead ... which should result in a significantly better tool set for
the industry.

As I have suggested before ... places where vendors are crying about
not having
enough funds to support their product lines (IE dropping support for
entire product
lines like the XC4K chips) while new product is on the shelf in
distribution and
production inventory ... could have done that much better by turning
over to a
customer/vendor open source partnership.

We hear frequently here that vendors cann't support anything other
than the top
few dozen customers ... that changes with active open source industry
partnerships
which are lead by industry paid staff.

John

I'd guess FPGA vendors are certainly not unaware of the advantages of
the opensource model.

I think that the problem for them is twofold:

1/ for old chips, netlists could be reverse-engineered from bitstream
easily with the chip specs. This would be a major blow to some FPGA
users.

2/ for newer chips, even with strong crypto and/or eeproms available
on all chip lines to prevent bitstream reversing, the major problem
would be to still allow selling closed IP components for the platform.
There's no solution to this problem -- it simply is unsolvable from an
information theory standpoint. The only thing possible would be to
change the business model, and I guess this is not likely to happen
anytime soon.

The change won't come from the most established FPGA vendor, that's
for sure -- maybe the contender could do something about it, though...

JB

Security thru obscurity has always made victims of the honest by
limiting their options. It's also slows, or prevents, real security
that develops from good vendor and customer partnerships.

> Security thru obscurity has always made victims of the honest by
> limiting their options. It's also slows, or prevents, real security
> that develops from good vendor and customer partnerships.

I fully agree with this view, but that's beside the point. The
business for FPGA IP is certainly inherently flawed, but it does
exist, and there's no reason for the vendors to harm it themselves.

JB