FPGA design under Mac OS X ?

AFAIK no, and likely never I suspect.

The Mac has had and still has some EDA tools for IC layout (4+), PCB (2+), spice simulation (few), opensource (GEDA etc)

but those were open to any technology or company.

FPGA is a lock in game, you choose your language and then your device & vendor and you need a tool with intimate knowledge of the device which can't be just encoded in a portable technology file as it was for ASIC design.

I could imagine myself developing a platform neutral FPGA floorplanning tool, probably use wxWidgets, maybe even use Java. While such a tool could not have precise knowledge of FPGA slices, it could have a crude enough model that would allow very responsive hand placing with immediate DRC, and feedback about likely performance. It seems today half of all delays are in the wiring and the current floorplanning tools are hopeless for the guy like me that wants complete visual control for some part of the layout. While the tools sort of work, the cycle time for changing the floor plan and rechecking each step is minutes when it should be

Get yourself a Linux machine (x86 obviously, not Linux on PPC) to run your FPGA development environment. You can use the Mac as an X-Server, but thats as close as you are going to be able to get. It's inconceivable that the FPGA or CAE companies would add a third platform.

What you mean like windows , linux and solaris ? (Most current tools don't support solaris)

Shouldn't take to much work to go from linux to OSX (depending on how they implemented the port) I'd be happy to beta test.

It is interesting to see some work starting to be done with eclipse and the GEF(graphical Editing Framework). see

Alex

message

run your

but

inconceivable that

ModelSim runs under a wish shell on Windows and Linux and Solaris, so it seems to me that the port would be rather painless.

Of course, look how long it took Mentor and Xilinx to support Linux.

So would I.

-a

Well, Java could could be the common platform for the rest of the world.

MB

--
Michel BILLAUD                  billaud@labri.fr
LABRI-Université Bordeaux I     tel 05 4000 6922 / 05 5684 5792
351, cours de la Libération     http://www.labri.fr/~billaud
33405 Talence  (FRANCE)

On a sunny day (16 May 2005 20:52:12 +0200) it happened Michel Billaud wrote in :

But it would start rotating at a very slow speed.

While I think that OSX would make a great FPGA (and EDA in general) platform, I wouldn't hold my breath for support from any of the FPGA companies.

You could use open source simulators like Icarus and GHDL (for VHDL) on OSX (I use GHDL on my Powerbook) to verify your design, but when it comes to synthesis there really aren't any viable open source options and there won't likely ever be due to the proprietary nature of FPGAs (unless someone comes up with an open source FPGA architecture).

BTW: Why do I think that OSX would make a great EDA platform? Less support issues than Linux because there aren't multiple distros to support. [Don't get me wrong, I like Linux (I'm using it right now :). However, I'm wondering if Linux makes a good platform for 'closed source software' (it could if companies understood the Linux platform better). It's definately great for open source software where you install by compiling source (./configure;make;make install); but when the source isn't available it can be a pain (static linking or shipping libraries could really help, but it doesn't seem to happen).]

OSX is more solid than Windows as well. This is especially important when you're talking about very large designs which might need to simulate for days, for example. OSX is a flavor of BSD Unix, after all.

Apple also makes some very nice 'workstation-like' hardware (Dual 2.7MHz G5 with 2GB RAM makes a nice workstation.) And when Apple releases Cell-based machines the performance will be way ahead of anything Intel/AMD based. ;-)

...also a lot of software developers seem to be moving to Macs these days. If you go to a conference like OSCON (O'Reilly Open Source Convention) one of the first things you notice is that about half of the attendees are using Powerbooks. These are your bleeding-edge developers and they seem to be on to something.

But again, I doubt you'll ever see any support for OSX from Xilinx or Altera (or even from the EDA companies for that matter).

Phil

But even doing that is no guarantee. Unfortunately, you need to be running a very specific Linux distro in many cases (ISE 7.1 is a case in point - I've yet to get it working acceptably well under Mandrake 10 or Debian. I'm told that it should work better under Mandrake 10.1 - when I get a chance I'll try it.

Well Big EDA (your Mentors, Cadences, Synopsys-es :) support more than 3 platforms already depending on the tool (Solaris, HPUX, Linux, Windows). I would imagine that it would be a lot easier to support OSX than it would be to support HPUX ;-) (if you've ever had to support HPUX, you know what I mean) But in general, you're right, they won't support another platform (OSX) unless they suddenly find a financially compelling reason to do so.

Phil

Yes, the port for something which has a Tk GUI (like ModelSim) would be painless, however it would mean running QA on another platform and that wouldn't be painless.

Me too.

However, when it comes to simulators there are already options available for both Verilog (Icarus) and VHDL (GHDL) simulation on OS X. You can simulate your design just fine on OS X, but you can't get it synthesized and into your FPGA.

Phil

They support HPUX and Solaris for historical reasons. Until Linux became mainstream those were the primary platforms for doing serious CAE work. They will continue to support them as long as they have important customers using them, when their big customers tell them that it's OK to drop support for one of those platforms they will do it in a heart beat. It cost a lot to support a platform. It's not the development costs it's the cost of verifying that the software works on the platform and of supporting customers. From a technical standpoint anything that runs on Linux & Solaris & HPUX would be trivial to port to OSX, it's probably just a recompile. The cost is in supporting users of yet another platform. There is absolutely no compelling reason for anyone to support OSX, Linux already provides a quality *nix environment on commodity hardware, so it's not going to happen.

I'd be happy with commandline tools + a decent simulator. Or even having to use eclipse as the ide.

Alex

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Windows).

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what I

platform

so.

I know a handful of scientists who've dumped their Solaris machines for G5 Macs running OS X. Their applications are either homegrown simulations which were easily ported (X11 is X11, after all) or commercial programs like Mathematica and Matlab. Point being that I don't think there's as much pain in going from Solaris to OS X as their is in going from any Unix to Windows.

-a

Well, that's nice in theory, but certainly with the Wind/U toolkit it's a no-go. Some X widgets (especially pulldown menus) are rendered in the top-left corner of the screen, and the first choice is unavailable. In other cases, the program simply crashes with a BadAccess error.

I have a dual 2.5GHz box, running Tiger with a linux machine sitting next to it, and a DVI KVM switchbox to switch between the two. I use the linux box for FPGA work, and the mac for everything else - it's nice to have one of the Apple 23" monitors though - especially when opening floorplanner :-)

The Linux box is significantly faster than the Mac anyway - a single

2.4GHz Opteron is about 2x as fast as a dual (I think it doesn't use both processors) 2.5 GHz Mac, at least in my experience.

Simon

That's curious because running the Xilinx tools with a Linux X-server works just fine, that's how I run it, I wonder what's broken in the OS-X implementation of X.

One other old solution would be to put a x86 board inside, atleast thats what people did with earlier Macs, it was always a bit slower than regular PC but then the heat would be quite a extra burden.

Don't know if Orange & the other guys are still in that business though.

though.

Not really cost-effective, what with throwaway $300 PCs!

-a

That's how I run it too.

Simon

Have you tried running it in VNC? I have many reasons to love VNC, persistence of my session in itself is enough.

Tommy