OPENCORES.ORG

FPGA design software is an interesting thing,
First up, to get the best of any FPGAs, the tools need to 'know' the chip ,
in detail, probably more detail than is open source / data book. Your
talking NDA level.

Second up, each chip family would need it's own optimiser.

Now I say "gnu C, is a great free compiler", and I agree, but,
	there are a lot more different types of FPGA's that need 'special'
bits than there are processors,
		QED: we'd need a lot more design effort than the gnu c guys
have put in as we'd need more code.
	and unfortunately , we are primarily hardware guys, not C coders, so
you might not find that many people to help.

I seem to remember companies like ST once tried to support a GNU FPGA tool
set, and if you do a grep around, you'll find a few tools on the web,

But mainly for FPGA's , I'd suggest that people use one tool for simulation,
and another tool  to put code into FPGA.
	If your doing small designs, these tools are free form vendors, if
your doing big designs, you are commercial, and you negotiate / pay for
tools.

andrewm@o...

-----Original Message-----
From: cores-bounces@o... [mailto:cores-bounces@o...] On
Behalf Of Uwe Hermann
Sent: 26 February 2008 18:23
To: cores@o...
Subject: [oc] Free/Open FPGA/CPLD design?

Hi,

I hope this question is not too stupid. I'm aware of many free software
(or rather free hardware) soft-cores for FPGAs on opencores.org and
elsewhere, which is a great trend.

However, is there also a free/open FPGA/CPLD design on which you can
actually _use_ the free soft-cores? I'm not really an FPGA expert
so maybe I'm missing something, but so far it looks like all the
underlying FPGAs on which people use free soft-cores are highly
proprietary and closed systems.

That's at least true as far as the hardware is concerned (layout,
schematics,
chips, etc of which the FPGA consists, as well as JTAG and other
programmers etc.), and very often also the software used for programming
these things (often Windows-only, binary-only, proprietary software).

Now, my questions is: does such a thing as a free (as in Free
Hardware, i.e. VHDL/schematics/whatnot under an open license) together
with free programming hardware and free programming software (and other
tools) exist? Anybody working on such a thing? If not, what are the
major obstacles?

The ultimate goal would be to be able to build/design hardware solutions
which are _really_ 100% Free/Open, even down to the FPGA layer itself.

Thanks, Uwe.
-- 
http://www.hermann-uwe.de  | http://www.holsham-traders.de
http://www.crazy-hacks.org | http://www.unmaintained-free-software.org
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