Robin Bruce ( snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com) wrote: : I heard quite a lot about the Viva development environment last week at : the MAPLD 2005 conference in Washington DC. A lot of people had good : things to say about it. It seemed to me like Starbridge are currently : focussing on porting Viva to different hardware platforms. This leads : to ask the question: are Starbridge no longer in the hardware business? : What does this leave the Hypercomputer?
: What are people's experience of using either Viva or the Hypercomputer?
I did get the impression from some talks earlier in the year that Starbridge are more interested in pushing their software - lots of other people make hardware and the margins are less on hardware.
Mind you my opinion of Viva isn't so great - it's bascially just a schematic capture tool and some libraries, and as nice as they seem they're more pain than they're worth - esp. as like most SC tools Viva is *proprietry*.
o As complexity grows schematic tools become more like a weight around the neck o Proprietry. If they go under you can kiss your design work goodbye for future platforms / technologies. o You loose the power of things like the VHDL generate statement o Lots more
Also Starbridge keep grosly misusing the word 'Polymorphic' when describing Viva
- Polymorphism in an FPGA design is not a very good idea (!) and what they actually mean is that datatypes aren't fixed until compile time which is entirely different to polymorphism.
I was also suprised by certian people hailing Viva as revolutionary, when it isn't. What *does* put Viva ahead of VHDL is the ability to design a core (e.g. FFT) and chance the datatype of the data flow from 8 bit fixed point to 24 bit floating point to 32 bit floating point etc. in an instant. In this sense it is easier than VHDL, but personally I reckon an HDL and a decent editor are almost as simple in this respect.
Actually I think Starbridge also provide libraries to assist interfacing FPGAs running Viva generated code to host CPU systems - but they are far from alone in this respect.
Cheers, Chris