Allright, My question is not about choosing Xilinx or Altera. From what I have read online, it seems that the choice mostly depends on personal experiences with the respective companies.
My question deals with soft-cores. If I write a soft-core in VHDL, is it possible to implement it on a Xilinx, Altera, Actel or other FPGA brands using their respective synthesizer software? To me VHDL is VHDL, so I do not understand why soft-cores written in VHDL like Picoblaze,Microblaze would be FPGA company specific?
What is the basic architectural differences of FPGAs which would prevent implementaion of soft-core (maybe like Microblaze) on Altera FPGAs? Is comparing Xilinx FPGAs and Altera FPGAs really like comparing apples and oranges? And then what about the newer FPGAs from Atmel(FPSLIC) or Actel etc.
Are there any publication which benchmark the different FPGAs and their technologies?
Is there a way to design soft-cores in VHDL so that they can be implemented on any reconfigurable platforms, like Xilinx FPGA, Atmel FPGA(FPSLIC) or Alterra FPGAs?
At this stage I just experimenting with different soft-cores for my thesis project, and I am just curious about all the excitement caused by the marketing blitz caused by newer FPGA products like FPSLIC, or Actel's FPGA etc. My perspective on this topic is educational and research based, so I would appreciate any help in that context.
Thanks in advance for all your suggestions.
-Yaju N Electrical and Computer Engineering Brigham Young University, Provo UT y a j u a t b y u . edu