Finally, selling my old Xilinx/Viewlogic software package

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What? I have tons of those

;-))))))

Reply to
Mawa_fugo

What? I have tons of those

;-))))))

JTAG-Adapters, dongles, I doubt.

If somebody has to change an old Xilinx-design, he will need the right software revison plus the dongle. The latest revisions dont help, because they no more support the old FPGA devices.

Helmut

Reply to
Helmut Sennewald

snipped-for-privacy@z3g2000yqz.googlegroups.com...

Doesn't Xilinx provide a "Classic" version of their tools?

I also have old versions of the Xilinx tools complete with dongle and programming cables. That's one of the reasons why I hate licenses. You may have everything you need, except if the PC is different you may need a new license file. That's the way it is with my current Lattice software. So far they have been happy to provide a license file for every new machine I've wanted to port the software to. But I am sure that one day that will no longer be the case and I'll be stuck!

The first time I see a way to get away from these proprietary, licensed tools, I'm gone in a flash!

Rick

Reply to
rickman

Why? Won't you need to deal with supporting older products?

Regards,

--don

Reply to
D Yuniskis

D Yuniskis wrote

Howdy Don :) Great to hear from you :)

I thought about this very hard.

Of the FPGA designs I did, for those which might come back, I would never have time to set up all the software (on a PC with a DOS partition, which I don't have anymore), go up the not insignificant learning curve on the software, and then be able to make a commercial project out of it.

Two of the designs were perhaps more significant.

One was a 32-channel sound generator (basically 32 programmable pulse generators feeding a 32-input OR gate) which was originally done in

1992, on a full size ISA card, no kidding. About 8 years ago the customer wanted a PCI version of this card. I said to them I will give them the whole design free of charge but they will need to find somebody else to do it. I posted around Usenet looking for an FPGA programmer in SE UK and one or two turned up and I passed them on but never heard anything else. The *huge* issue is the commercial risk: one has to quote a fixed price, which would make it very profitable if the old tools worked fine, nothing went wrong, and I could still get the XC3030/3090 TQFP chips (which I probably could). But if something goes wrong, and e.g. I have to buy new tools, I would lose some high 4- or low 5-digit sum on it.

The other was basically a complicated custom UART supporting some weird characters (122 bits long) with CRCs and all kinds of stuff. This project was done in 1993 and was hugely profitable, helping me to establish my manufacturing business (the kind of thing every consultant should be doing before his hair goes grey and his sandals fall apart :)). To my astonishment the project came up 12 years later, via a completely different customer (but the same end user) and I simply bought more of the XC3090 devices (PLCC, seemed to be available OK) and to my amazement it worked. I first sent a few devices to the customer (who was pretty smart) and he put them into his old boards, and it all worked, so evidently Xilinx did not change the silicon to make it much faster (and break my timing, which was done according to the *then* Xilinx guidelines which said it was OK to use local interconnect (with some 'max skew = 2ns or whatever' parameter on the wire) for clocks because the interconnects were much faster than the D to Q propagation delays). The customer may buy again but I just need to source some more of the old devices. He won't need a logic redesign.

The main project I did with the tools was maybe 1 man year spent on prototyping various evolutions of a very low power ASIC, with about

5000 gate equivalent of logic, a real time clock, etc. This one is not coming back.

These tools will be very valuable to somebody who did designs in those days, which might come back for modifications. The devices are for the most part available; I checked the XC3090 etc about 2 years ago and Xiling were still selling them, and there are bound to be plenty on the surplus market which these days is huge.

Reply to
Peter

rickman wrote

Xilinx did this to the software I am selling. Old dongles no longer supported, and all schematics got orphaned. Fortunately, some enterprising chap developed a "work around" :)

Incidentally, does Viewlogic still exist as a product? I see they were bought by Mentor.

Reply to
Peter

Yes, Mentor bought them some time ago and I believe it is still a product, but with a different name. Everyone still uses schematics for board level design, so the tools will always be there. Although to a large extent, even schematics are really just pin lists.

When I plop an FPGA on the drawing page I am treating it like a pin connection list tying each pin (with its pin name) to a short net with its net name. The other end of the connection is almost always on a different page with the same net name/pin name connection list. The fact that the pin names are inside a box and have numbers doesn't really make it anything much different from a pin connection table.

I wonder how long it will be before we give up on schematics altogether and just write pin lists or net lists? The only real advantage to a schematic from what I have seen is that our minds are pretty good at remembering things like orientation around a dial. So the component box becomes a watch face, if you will, and we can more easily remember that signal foo is in the upper right hand corner than we can remember that it is two thirds down in the pin list.

Rick

Reply to
rickman

rickman wrote

IMHO functionality is much more obvious from a schematic.

Less so, I admit, if the design is just a load of random digital logic.

Reply to
Peter

snip..

After I'm retired I hope. A well drawn schematic is a thing of beauty, helping techs to troubleshoot and customers to understand a product.

You could also ask when mechanical engineers will stop using fab drawings and just send the data as G codes.

Reply to
Jim Stewart

I guess if you have an analog design with a lot of small components a schematic is good, but for many digital designs there is almost no point. Look inside any number of modern products and you see one, two or three large IC packages with lots of traces between them and few smaller components. The schematics for these products are horrendous, often much less clear than a simple pin list. Its not that they were drawn badly, but that it is impossible to draw a 300+ pin part with much utility. Even by breaking the part into sections it still ends up being a pin list with a box around it.

I'll grant that analog designs can gain from schematic, but many of the digital ones are pointless when drawn.

Rick

Reply to
rickman

In comp.arch.fpga rickman wrote: (snip)

Some time ago, I was wondering about using Verilog for PC board design.

One reason was the idea of taking an old circuit design and implementing it on a new PC board, but also the whole thing in an FPGA. If both could be done from the same Verilog, it seemed easier... (I mostly write structural Verilog, that is, continuous assignment, with a minimal amount of behavioral Verilog.)

And that list could be in the form of Verilog continuous assignment. That seems a little less obvious for power and ground, though.

With BGA packaging, though, that doesn't seem so important.

It does seem interesting that many have gone away from schematic capture for logic design, but do they still use it for PC design?

-- glen

Reply to
glen herrmannsfeldt

In comp.arch.fpga Peter wrote: (snip)

There are netlist to schematic programs. They never work quite as well as you wish, but sometimes good enough.

-- glen

Reply to
glen herrmannsfeldt

In comp.arch.fpga Jim Stewart wrote: (snip)

But some things just get too big to do that way. Would you really like to see the schemtic for the Itanium chip?

There is the story about the design of the Boeing 777, all done on computers. When the designers saw the actual airplane, they were surprised by how big it was. They had been looking at it all those years on computer monitors. I suppose in previous designs, that parts would be constructed along the way, looked at by designers, and changed as needed. That may have been done much less in the case of the 777.

-- glen

Reply to
glen herrmannsfeldt

glen herrmannsfeldt wrote

There is a prog called VIEWGEN I think (in the package I am selling). I used it to generate a schematic from a state machine done in CUPL.

There was no point in going to a schematic as the result made no sense but it was the only way I could see of merging the ex-CUPL state machine block into the rest of the design.

Nowadays I guess one would use VHDL or similar and it would integrate into the workflow properly.

Towards the end of my era of doing complicated logic designs, a very nice product was from somebody like Altera. It was a FREE VHDL compiler, crippled to work with just a few low end devices e.g. a

22V10. People used this to do VHDL designs for devices totally unconnected with that device vendor, because VHDL compilers were so expensive :)
Reply to
Peter

I'm pretty bad when it comes to drawing schematics for PCB's as that was never my primary job. I have also played with the idea of using an HDL or even EDIF as I can write some neat Common Lisp software to throw s-expressions around.

The big problem is not to create the netlist, but to interface it to the parts database and the back-end tools which is usually proprietary. One possibility would be to use gEDA or similar open source PCB tools for the back-end work.

Petter

--
.sig removed by request.
Reply to
Petter Gustad

Cypress WARP, maybe? I designed a good few PAL/GAL devices with it. There was a cut-off-at-the-knees version of the Veribest VHDL simulator, too - can't remember who shipped that. I still have a copy on my machine, but I can't get it to run under XP.

--
Jonathan Bromley
Reply to
Jonathan Bromley

Jonathan Bromley wrote

That's the one...

I suppose VHDL was better than CUPL - if you had been on a VHDL course :)

Reply to
Peter

Understood. I try to keep "live" copies of all my tools so the first issue isn't a problem. But, I will concede that the second issue can be daunting -- especially if it has been any serious amount of time since last used (I find moving between different OS's to be a chore even after just a few days! :< Different applications are much worse!)

Yup. I won't even quote upgrades that look like they will venture into The Great Unknown. Experience says that even T&M can be a losing prospect :<

I don;t recall yours as showing much age! :> Though it *has* been a few years (and I am always amazed at just how *quick* things like this can change ;-)

Wow! I wouldn't have thought them to still be available! I've an XC4xxx in a design that I had abandoned figuring it would be impossible to get...

Ah!

So, your attitude is "move on to new tools *if* the need arises"?

Reply to
D Yuniskis

D Yuniskis wrote

You're very kind :) My new girl is looking after me well :) Another reason I don't do FPGA design anymore ;)

I think the 4k devices are pretty well available. Also there is a huge (vast) surplus component market out there. You could keep yourself stocked in 1990s parts for ever. They gradually get more expensive, and are rarely available right there when you want them (the stocks appear at random times) and you can't get real production volumes, but "low cost" and "Xilinx" was never said in the same sentence :) The top end 4k devices were about $1500 when I looked at using one for building a replacement for a UART (one of the TMS9900 family) which TI stopped making but there were many 1000s in the field and for some bizzare reason they had defective silicon which made them all fail after some years. I lined-up an FPGA designer for the customer on that job... That would have been a fun project - building a drop-in replacement for a fairly complex uP peripheral chip. Obviously one would not be implementing stuff like SDLC...

Actually, my attitude would be to bit-bang it with an Atmel uC. Every single FPGA design I ever did could have been done with a fast simple uC, with a bit of imagination - except the ASIC prototyping projects, obviously. Might need a few chips on the outside but the learning curve of assembler programming is maybe 1% of the l.c. on FPGA design. And you don't have to re-learn everything every time the FPGA vendor turns everything upside down in trying to keep ahead of the competition. I decided long ago that FPGAs are a technology for "must get there now before the competition no matter what the long term cost is" and the long term cost is that after a few years you cannot maintain the design because after the original designer has left nobody will want to touch it. And the later tools will not import the original designs, which is really great.... in fact that happened right after Xilinx dropped Viewlogic as schematic entry. I had loads of correspondence with them at the time but their view was "tough... move on". All schematics had to be re-drawn in the new tool. You could keep VL running somewhere but if the dongle broke, everything was orphaned. Luckily, as I said, the dongle got cracked ;)

Reply to
Peter

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