Best Xilinx toolchains for under $2,000 ?

Dear All,

I'm just about to purchase Xilinx ISE BaseX plus MXE for 1,295 USD. Having downloaded the free edition I have to say I'm less than impressed with the general user friendliness - no keyboard shortcuts, no code completion, etc.

Is it the case that in terms of commercial tools chains ISE plus Modelsim is the only thing in the market under $2,000?

It would be great to hear from any other Xilinx developer's that have found an alternative under 2,000 USD.

Thanks,

Andy.

Reply to
AndyAtHome
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I haven't had any gripes with Webpack XST other than very optimistic XST synth results for sp3. KB shortcuts wouldn't save me much, you can use other text editors instead of that provided like TextPad with language support. I am not sure code completion means much, if the tool could guess what you want, I thinks it would be mostly wrong. HDL keyword completion might help a little but code entry is pretty minimal part of design isn't it. Theres also the templates ready made to edit.

At a DAC show I picked up a full license for 1 of the other Verilog simulators for $1K, it was the 1st time they ever sold a license on the floor to an EE. Normally EDA budgets are out of EE hands so they usually only sell outside the show to accounts.

There is also the free HDL simulators but I haven't tried them.

regards

johnjakson_usa_com

Reply to
john jakson

As Jon says, don't rely on the P+R tools for design entry, there are much better text editors about (I too use Textpad).

The 'full' version of Modelsim is >$5K I think.

Have a look at ..

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..for a less expensive alternative.

Nial Stewart

------------------------------------------------ Nial Stewart Developments Ltd FPGA and High Speed Digital Design

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Reply to
Nial Stewart

Both Emacs and Xemacs are available on every platform. There is an excellent Verilog mode as well as VHDL mode that will do everything that you ever dreamed you needed. Don't waste your time using primitive editors.

Reply to
B. Joshua Rosen

Emacs + Icarus Verilog + Quartus II does the trick for me quite nicely and all is for free.

The _only_ thing I miss from the paid-for Quartus is the FPGA Editor and more device support. I spend 95% of the time in Emacs and Icarus Verilog, so I don't care much about the remaining 5% as long as it works (and Quartus II is very stable). When I used Xilinx WebPACK I even had scripted the P&R and programming tools so I would never leave Emacs. I have yet to take the time to figure out how to do that with Quartus.

I'm curious, what are you really expecting better for your $2k? A better editor?

Tommy

AndyAtHome wrote:

Reply to
Tommy Thorn

And there's another option: some of the features of Verilog mode for emacs--automatic argument lists, automatic module instantiation--can be run in batch mode. I invoke emacs in batch mode from inside UltraEdit (world's best text editor, IMHO) and never have to look at an emacs screen or struggle with the funky emacs command sequences. Very nice.

Bob Perlman Cambrian Design Works

Reply to
Bob Perlman

Thanks for all your replies.

Tommy - I should have mentioned that I'm from a Java background, so moving from my favourite IDE, IntelliJ's IDEA, to Xilinx's editor I instantly missed features like code completion.

However, as was pointed out, HDL design entry will perhaps only consume a small percentage of total development time, and so editor features are perhaps less important than in a high level language IDE.

As there seems to be abundant alternatives to the in built editor, I'm not going to worry about it too much.

Nial - Thanks for the recommendation, I'll check out Symphony EDA. You're right about the Modelsim price, I spoke to a distributor who mentioned circa 3,000 UKP for PE edition, however I was hoping to get away with the XE edition for the moment and use

Reply to
AndyAtHome

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