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A comment on Cheap FPGA Development Boards: What to look for. Parent comment

Re:Cheap FPGA Development Boards: What to look for by cottonseed on Sunday August 03, 2014 @10:43AM (#8128030)
> Do note that this project does not synthesize or route for chips, only load the bit files onto the chips. Other work is being done on that.

The only project I'm aware of that has made progress on reverse engineering the Xilinx bitstream is fpgatools:

https://github.com/Wolfgang-Spraul/fpgatools

It only works with a Spartan-6 LX9, and then only has partial support (e.g. no block RAM). I'd be interested in hearing about other projects like this if you're aware of them.

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Re:Cheap FPGA Development Boards: What to look for by jessydiamondman on Sunday August 03, 2014 @03:10PM (#8128811)
A few friends are working on making a generic tool that will support lots of different architectures, but since Xilinx has a clause in their agreement for downloading ISE that you will not reverse engineer the software, and that you will not use the output of the software (the bit files for example) to reverse engineer anything. This means that you can't compile a bunch of slightly different things in ISE and check what the bit files look like. The only alternative my friends can think about are rather extreme ways of getting around this.
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