I start to wonder if there is something weird with my design. I use a spartan 3 (4k), vhdl, and I suspect the synthesizer takes too long time and I would like to compare with other users. My design was completely done (all phases) in about 40minutes on a reasonable new pc (P4 2.8GHz) with lot of RAM (2.75GB). The synthesis phase used about 30 of these minutes. I suspect that one of my blocks (cpu interface) could take very long time cause of some insanely long std_locic_vectors(2047:0) used for i/o area where 95% of the bits are optimized away. It's kind of hard to test without doing much work with the design. There is no swapping going on on the HD.
How fast is yours?
Any other experiences what causes synthesis to go slow?
Cheers