The Lack of Open Tooling for FPGAs

Re:The Lack of Open Tooling for FPGAs by pslam on Monday April 20, 2015 @05:14PM (#9410922)

I've been wondering recently how viable it would be to implement an FPGA-within-an-FPGA:

  * Create a model of a simple, open FPGA.
  * Create tools to support the open FPGA.
  * Synthesize the FPGA for an existing proprietary FPGA.
  * Install bitstream in SPI NOR.
  * Ignore the proprietary FPGA from now on - work with the open FPGA that's inside it.

Yes, it would be absurdly inefficient. However, you can buy pretty huge FPGAs for very little these days. If the ratio of host:target LUTs isn't too bad, and you can find constructs which synthesize efficiently, it might yield something usable.

Perhaps it could be a way of bootstrapping an "open" FPGA effort.

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Re:The Lack of Open Tooling for FPGAs by diamondman on Monday April 20, 2015 @05:50PM (#9411078)

Amusingly the Xilinx license states that you are not allowed to use the bitstreams generated by their software in any device that they did not manufacture. This means if you implemented a xilinx fpga in an altera fpga, it would be against the agreement to program the inner xilinx fpga with the bitstream. The more you know!

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Re:The Lack of Open Tooling for FPGAs by femto on Monday April 20, 2015 @10:52PM (#9412028)

You might be interested in the now defunct Meta-FPGA (MPGA) project, which attempted this exact thing:

ftp://ftp2.de.freebsd.org/pub/misc/opencores/ml-archive/archives/cores/0109/msg00019.html

The idea was to use the proprietary tools to produce a once off "meta-FPGA" bitstream for each device. From then on, the open-source MPGA tools would be used to synthesise, place and route designs.

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