Re:Cheap FPGA Development Boards
by b1ackb0x on Saturday August 08, 2020 @01:54PM
(#24093653)
FPGA tools allow a lot of customization if you need it, what difference will it make if they are fully opensource? FPGA chip design isn't opensource anyway
[ Parent
| on HN ]
The vendors tools are notoriously buggy, don't conform to the HDL standard and
lacks support to inference of some functional block (cascade DSPs and FIFOs for
example).
Some FPGAs features are only available on yearly paid subscription. Also, the license is very restrictive, publishing benchmarking is not allowed, therefore, there is no public information on how to chose a computer to have faster synthesis.
Other than solving those issues, an open source framework enable the researches to search for newer place and route algorithms; enables new HDL languages to target the actual hardware instead of using verilog as intermediate language.
Well you can say the same thing about computers. But if computers were as closed as some FPGA offerings, then we wouldn't have had Linux and its ecosystem of open/free tools, for instance.