Which board to buy? Status of open source tools?

Why bother with Open Source stuff when various incarnations of commerical tools are free to use? Check out for the Xilinx WebPack:

Cheers, JonB

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Apart from entry level HDL simulation, I wouldn't expect too much from open source for anything really difficult. The structure of FPGAs is generally too complicated & proprietary for opensource. It was different when everyone was doing ASIC & polygon design, then anyone could write code that would work with any vendor.

You can run the free WebPack under VPC for Mac and take the speed hit, interested to see a comparison of that v near equiv x86 running native. I'd bet its 10x slower.

you can google geda, open source eda tools, there are quite a few out there but mostly not much updated. Also hang out in the verilog/vhdl NGs.

regards

johnjakson_usa_com

I think you misunderstand the point of Open Source - price is only one aspect (and open source software is not necessarily free, although normally you can find any given open source program somewhere for free downloading. Frequently you can buy pre-packaged CD's, often with support, such as Linux distributions or the OpenTech cdrom

The original poster was looking for open source tools because he likes to tinker with the software, and because he wants to run the software on something other than an x86 machine. That is possible with open source software, but not with free closed source software.

Sites worth looking at are

have a browse of

xilinx webpack is free

same with Quartus from altera parallax were selling a few boards also altera was selling some "student" boards a while back

Alex

here is the link for the altera uni program board

"Alex Gibson" schrieb im Newsbeitrag news: snipped-for-privacy@uni-berlin.de...

That board comes with a pretty 'old' (and 'small') FPGA. A little bit above your $200 limit, but with a Cyclone EP1C6 or EP1C12 (Altera's new low cost devices) and 1 MB fast memory:

Here's a link to the parallax boards:

Cyclone 1C3 based, $195:

Cyclone 1C20 based, $295:

Also check out the JOP board listed elsewhere in this thread, which is another reasonably-priced Cylone board.

All Cyclone devices are supported by Quartus II web edition, which you can download for free from:

Quartus includes HDL synthesis, schematic entry, place and route, static timing analysis, visualization, floorplanning tools, etc. Pretty much all you need to learn about FPGAs.

Larger list of Altera-based development boards (most more expensive than you want though):

Regards,

Vaughn Altera

Because in the long term, an open-source tool chain can out perform a commercial tool. Case in point: how many Unix/C developers compile with a commercial alternative to GCC?

Unfortunately, the track record of open-source FPGA implementation tools has been dismal. Icarus is the only open-source tool I know that attempts Xilinx synthesis. I believe it handles synthesis and technology mapping, but has little, if no optimization.

I did start a Virtex2 packer/placer awhile back. I got as far as parsing the post-synthesis EDIF netlist and building a graph of FPGA primitives. The goal was to pack and place the CLBs, then update the UCF with LOC constraints. I still have the code lying around in case anyone is interested.

BTW, Confluence can compile it for Mac X. It will solved your design, simulation, and verification problems, but for FPGA compilation, you're still locked into commercial tools.

-Tom

Digilent Inc

Anna Acevedo - Manager Xil> Howdy all,

I have been evaluating tools for the ARM MCU and all my info says that gcc is a less efficient tool than the commercial ones. I guess it only stands to reason that the commercial tools must be better, why else would they sell well enough to keep the companies in business?

I think John Jakson summed it up pretty well, open source FPGA tools are not practical for a number of reasons that have been discussed here many times before. Some people seem to think that FPGA and ASIC tools are the same as compiliers, but in reality they are very different.

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What do you mean by "less efficient" ? There are big differences between run-time efficiency and develop-time efficiency, and the balance choosen between these will vary according to user and project. There is little doubt that there are commercial compilers that produce smaller and faster code than gcc for many processors (including arm), but developer efficiency can be a serious issue too. I write C code for five different processors, amongs other work - it is simply not economically feasible to buy top-of-the-range commercial compilers for all of these, while gcc works fine for me. I also find it in many ways to be a more advanced compiler than some compilers I have used (especially in terms of compile-time error checking). There are plenty of cases where commercial compilers would make most economic sense overall, but it is far from every case.

There is one, and only one, reason why any company stays in business - it is able to persuade enough people that its product is worth the money. It may or may not be the case that the product actually *is* worth the money (to the given customer), but the immediate technical qualities of the product are only one part of the sale - there are many other relevant issues such as support and upgrade paths, and many irrelevant issues such as the persuasiveness of the salesfolk, the guilibitity of the purchasing people, and the quality of their flashy power-point slides and free pens. I'm not trying to say that commercial compilers are not worth the money - I'm just pointing out the naivity of the "it costs more so it must be worth more" argument.

I think there's also the point that the intersection of the sets "compiler users" and "can write (and is interested in writing) software" is much larger than that for "FPGA place and route tool users" and the "writing software" sets.

Cheers, Martin

Certainly when a compiler targets a specific architecture, it can do a better job. But in terms of the number of supported platforms and its decent code optimization, it's hard to beat GCC.

Sure the algorithms are different, but there are many similarities: Like a compiler, most logic optimizations are NP-complete, therefore many of the same strategies can be applied. Both a compiler and a synthesizer deal with dataflow analysis and resource allocation. Instruction reordering is similar to retiming. Memory and execution timing tradeoffs are somewhat analogous to tradeoffs with area and performance.

I agree the closer you get to implementation, the less pratical an open source tool becomes. But where is the line drawn? Clearly synthesis falls on our side. Multi-chip partioning is certainly possible. And with the capabilities of UCF, I would argue placement is a canidate as well.

I am not interested in debating the whole topic of open source tools. You have your *opinion* and I have mine. But your *facts* are not self evident. Feel free to use any tool you wish. And that includes all the open source FPGA tools... :)

Again, you confuse the facts with your opinion. If I pay for a tool, then by definition it is worth the money I paid. You can assume that products are sold by Machiavellian sales people to Dilbert purchasers, but in the real world everyone decides for themselves what is best. End of story.

I am not going to debate the open source tool question. I don't care what you use. But it is not a *fact* that GCC "out performs" commercial tools.

There may be a few similarities, but you are only looking at technical issues. The real problem has to do with the way the FPGA devices keep changing. It is a major job for the vendors to keep up with their own devices, it is not practical for open source tools to always be a generation or two behind.

If it is so practical, why has it not been done properly? As an earlier poster stated, some projects have been started, but none have produced anything useful and many have just been dropped.

So where are the tools? Rather than rehash the issue here, google this group and read what has already been posted over the last two years.

"Anna Acevedo" escribió en el mensaje news: snipped-for-privacy@xilinx.com...

hi, is there any Virtex-II Pro (with only one PPC core embedded, XC2VP4-5FG456C), the clock, config ROM, JTAG (maybe also USB) and some RAM board out there?

cause i've seen some cards from Memec (there's one at about 400dollars with EDK and 200 without it), but they dont have any RAM, and other boards have too much peripheals that i dont need and then they have like 20 user I/O pins available, cause they have keyboard, display, leds, parallel port, A/D, D/A, video, and a lot of other stuff. If i wanted those peripheals later i guess i'd get a daughter board, but in the beggining i'd like as much I/O as possible

another one is the one for gameboy (i dont know it's name) it seems to have everything i want, just the FPGA is not a Virtex-II Pro

any pointers will be appreciated

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Much of what I wrote was not opinion, but fact - for the particular case in question (i.e., my professional compiler usage). As I said, the situation will be different for different people - that's also fact. As for opinions - we all have plenty of them!

Choice is an excellent thing - in the case of fpga development, I choose to use an open-source tool (Confluence - once I get the hang of it :-), a closed source paid-for tool (Quartus), a paid-for (but with some source) component (Nios), and open-source compiler and debugger software masquerading as closed-source (Gnu-pro compiler toolset for the Nios). I like to be able to pick and choose.

Incidently, isn't it interesting that both Altera and Xilinx have standardised on gcc for the compiler for their soft-processor cores?

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By your definitions, you must be a perfect customer. Are you suggesting that you have never bought something that was not a good buy? I'm sure you make careful decisions about purchasing an expensive development tool - most of us do that (at least, those of us who are fortunate enough to be able to make such purchasing decisions ourselves). But there is a long way between the extremes of the mythical perfect customer and the mythical perfect salesman and idiot customer combination.

Because I'm using FreeBSD/KDE ?

I really sympathize with the desire to get tools that are "open" or at least interoperable. I had the misfortune of participating in the "CAD Framework Initiative" back in the early 90's when briefly, the major powers of CAD believed they could agree to some open interfaces so that each others tools could be mixed and matched. Some of that work lives on in things like EDIF but for the most part vendors don't want to do anything that might make it possible for someone to compete with them.

--Chuck