MicroBlaze is no available as Open-Source!! (from independant 3rd party)

A quick follow-up to my previous post

Quartus

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It turns out DSE is also in Web Edition. Just type quartus_sh --dse at the command line, or select DSE from the GUI under Tools/Tcl Scripts..., or pick it from the Windows Start Menu. The Web Edition does not include the Physical Synthesis Optimizations which are one of the big hammers you (and DSE) have to improve design performance. As an example, I did a quick run at work on this design in Stratix II 2S15C3 device w/200 Mhz clock constraint:

Push-button (Auto Fit, Balanced Mapping): 130.2 Mhz Physical Synthesis Extra-Effort + Speed Mapping + Synthesis Netlist Optimizations: 178.5 Mhz

That's a +37% using non-default options. DSE will find the right set of options for your design, at the expense of run-time. But it sure beats hand-optimizing for weeks when you need that extra few %!

somehow

Fitter guys confirmed it. Likely causes are register packing, as well as how we pack ALUTs into ALMs. The results of these operations can be randomly perturbed by changes in the timing model.

naysayers

marketing

sweeps

They do actually provide the source code for free. There is a link on their web site.

Cheers, JonB

No doubt their version of eclipse will be based on the standard C/C++ plugin with a few extras. It's already pretty easy to set eclipse up to target MicroBlaze / NIOS / any other GNU toolchain based processor.

Cheers, Jon

i2c

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So I've heard - I haven't looked (being a Nios user myself). I was merely correcting a misconception as to Xilinx's obligations under the GPL. It looks like they are happy to go beyond the letter of the law and are supporting the spirit of the GPL by making the source code easily available.

What do you need eclipse for anyway? I'm happy with a makefile and emacs...

Petter