WebPACK license (and Quartus Web Edition too).

I've had no problems at all renewing Altera web-edition licences.

I'm sure the X&A members of this group can clarify better, but to my understanding the rationale behind the free editions is simply to remove a cost associated with people working with the smaller devices, and thus help people on shoestring budgets to stay with their products. Obviously they get their pound of flesh later on when you buy the parts for your product.

If you're looking at using one of the more sophisticated/larger devices these might not be supported bt the web-edition, but if you're looking at designing onto those higher cost chips then the couple of thousand euro/dollars for the full edition tool is not a big part of the overall development cost anyhow.

Also in the Quartus case for sure the web-edition doesn't give you SignalTap (built-in logic analyser) and I don't think it gives you ModelSim (could be wrong on that), so your ability to verify complex logic is somewhat diminished.

SignalTap II will be enabled if you open the TalkBack backdoor...

One more question ^) Does it allowed to use (for private person or organization)Xilinx ISE WebPack for developing commercial projects ?

organization)Xilinx ISE WebPack for developing commercial projects ?

Yes.

Ed

I will hope what Xilinx is not worse than Altera. :-)

Why do I ask this question? Last time I see (at many sites) advertisement "FREE LICENSE ..." and next by very very small letters "... for 6 months".

There are some underlying assumptions there which aren't necessarily true.

The biggest assumption is that individuals and small firms doing small-volume products never work on apps which need large devices.

That is simply not true....but I do agree that it sure seems to be a common myth; t the mfg's like Altera etc., and sadly, among many people here as well.

A built-in assumption there is that a single mfg's parts will satisfy all of an individual's or small firm's applications. That's not true of a large firm, so why would anyone think it true of a small firm?

In reality, since a large firm tends to make many products in the

-same field-, whereas an individual designer or small firm tends to make products covering -several different- fields; the small outfit is

-more- likely to need IC's from different makers to best fit their projects.

In a specialized application where the total build might be, say, 30 boards; several thousand dollars is a good chunk of the total bottom-line for the project.

Multiply that by the 5 different setups required in order to work with larger parts from 5 different makers...plus annual "maintenance" fees times 5....yeah, it's a burden...not something to sneeze at, in my view.

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I certainly agree, particularly as Reconfigurable computing enters the market as mainstream. here each FPGA computer user is expected to buy expensive vendor tools just to place and router HDL designs, even if they don't care about doing hardware designs for an FPGA product.

For a small R&D consultant it's a signficiant percentage of gross, especially when you need to support multiple vendors platforms to be competitive. That means that only large high volume shops are likely design in products.

Same for RC users .... the vendor maintence fees to place and route are as much each year as the high end FPGA being used as a computational engine. Conside that XV4VLX200 chips are roughly the same price in volume as the annual maintence contract to actually use it as a computer -- ditto for large parts with PPC cores.

Everybody would scream foul place if Intel/AMD held a similar IP lock on the assembly language and linker products (IE CPU bit streams) and required that you by an Intel linker (equiv of X&A place, route, bitstream generation tools) just to use your 4GHz Pentium.

The reason that large X & A FPGA's remain low volume and that RC has had a difficult time taking off is simply the cold hard lock on their development tool IP prevents high volume adoption as a computational tools ... that leaves FPGA cold in the computational market, except for very high end or very low end uses.

This mirrors the whole discussion about X & A NDA terms in their EULA locking open source out of actively using the their products, with the exception of some university projects that they quietly ignore the release of IP that isn't otherwise publicly documented.

The profit from additional FPGA chip sales would very likely exceed the lost revenues for tool chain fees by several times, if not orders of magnitude, if they would just make the full product line available to the web pack tools -- allowing small R&D shop design in's, and removing the unrealistic maintence fee burden from reconfigurable computing end users that could care less about designing hardware products with FPGA's.

You download the new version of WebPACK (which is free) and agree to that licence agreement. Ask Xilinx to extend free license? No. Nobody has ever asked to extend a free license.

Steve