On 1/28/08, Terry Hancock <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Dieter wrote: > >>And i'm always astonished when i talk with VLSI/FPGA guys, that > >>they can cope with the brokenness of their tools which are by far > >>worse than gcc, especially considering what Synplicity and Mentor > >>Graphics ask for their tools[1]. > > > > What choice do they have? You do the best you can with the tools you have. > > > > Someone should write a FLOSS alternative. Unfortunately that is more than > > an easy Saturday afternoon project. > > More than that, wouldn't it require considerable reverse-engineering? > > My understanding from earlier conversations about this is that the > interface language used to program the FPGAs is proprietary and > undocumented, and that's the real reason there's no free software tools > for programming FPGAs.
Undocumented and proprietary yes, but probably really not that hard to figure out. Writing a good synthesizer and dealing with the NP-complete problem that is P&R are what are difficult about this. I was talking with someone who had worked for Lattice, I think, who had some good ideas about how to go about this. Sadly, we're both too busy to work on it, and finding some people to do the coding for us isn't likely to happen. -- Timothy Normand Miller http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~millerti Open Graphics Project _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
