Reimar Döffinger wrote: > The free tools only work with really tiny FPGAs, you can not select the > bigger ones.
Actually, the free tools work with some moderately large FPGAs, e.g., the XC3S1600E. That's definitely not a "really tiny FPGA" by any reasonable measure. The problem here is that the OGD is using (by design) one of the largest FPGAs available. There actually is an older version of WebPACK that can support the XC3S4000, but that older version did not run natively on Linux. It did run OK on Wine. > Another point, though I do not know if this is maybe the "industry > standard" is that I find the Xilinx tools, at least ISE/Xst just not > suitable for serious use. Many engineers seem to find them adequate or even good for "serious use". > It starts with small issues, like a missing ';' completely confusing > there parser, making it give completely unrelated and nonsensical errors > (something I haven't seen with software compiler since a decade), Many compilers still do this. > not even warning about things it simply cannot synthesize correctly Every time I have accidentally put something into my design that XST can't synthesis, it has given me a message to that effect. > and finally with complex > code it needs frequent fine-tuning of options just to not make it simply > crash. I haven't had that problem with any release of ISE I've used, from 6.1 to present, and I've done designs that filled up fairly large parts. > nevertheless I can not help being convinced that Xilinx does not have a > QA department (at least for the software side of things). I've been a professional programmer for more than 25 years, so I think I have at least some clue about software quality. In my opinion, for the complexity of the ISE software (and it is at least an order of magnitude more complex than just a typical compiler/linker toolchain used for software development), it seems to have significantly above average quality. Eric _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
