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Message
From: Rick Collins<gnuarm.2006@a...>
Date: Wed Feb 27 19:48:27 CET 2008
Subject: [oc] Free/Open FPGA/CPLD design?
Comments in your text.At 01:22 PM 2/26/2008, you wrote:
>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.
No, you didn't miss anything. There are no open source FPGA/PLD chip
designs.
>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).
Yes, even ignoring the proprietary chips, there are no complete
development chains for PLD design. Most/all PLD vendors want to
protect their designs, so they keep secret the details of the
architecture as much as possible. That means there are one or two
pieces of software that are very hard to write.
The other pieces exist open source, HDL compilers, simulators and
even debugging tools.
>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 big obstacle to open source PLD chips is the cost. Software can
be developed a bit at a time by a lot of people so that none have to
contribute excessive amounts of time or money. Even boards can be
designed without excessive amounts of time or money (depending on
your definition of excessive). But chips are very expensive and time
intensive beasts to build. Chip design is only practical in larger
volumes. There are also any number of patent issues as this field is
full of patent land mines.
I believe there are places where you can get chips made as cheaply as
boards, but there are minimum quantities that make the total cost
significant.
>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.
This has been batted around in various forums before and it is not an
easy task. Think of it as designing your own CPU architecture like a
SPARC and getting the device made in addition to all of the support
software... no small task and no small expense.
Rick
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