jauntywundrkind
8 months ago
It's so criminal and just rank ass terrible for this amazing segment of computing that it is - by and large - locked up behind incredibly hard to negotiate expensive software packages and solutions.
This is totally the gateway to seeing & understanding what computing actually is. And there are outstanding and fantastic chips with all kinds of capability on offer.
But almost universally they require very expensive obtuse custom/proprietary software to do anything at all. And two thirds the features on the chip require expensive IP add-ons to use from there.
It's just so so so unfortunate what a ceiling there is on adoption for fpgas. So much capability and so little ability for an empoweredearned community to form around such amazing power. There's something deeply scary to me especially about how, with fpga and RISC-V chip design in general, digital logic is cheap and plentiful, but as soon as you want interconnect or memory or io, as soon as you are looking beyond the scope of what you can do inside the scope of a chip, it's $$$ galore to buy ways to talk to the outside world, that open chip design & progress is strong but only in the confines of the digital domain.
tdeck
8 months ago
The reason it's like this (and I agree it sucks) is that this kind of software is quite complex to develop and the likely userbase is very small. If you're a hobbyist or even a professional engineer and your goal is to make a specific thing to accomplish a task, rather than use a specific technology, well over 99% of the projects you can think of doing will be much better served by a commodity microprocessor than an FPGA. And cheap MCUs are getting faster every day, so certain things that might have needed an FPGA in the past can make do with programmable microcontroller I/O and maybe an affordable DSP chip today.
blihp
8 months ago
Not so complex as to prevent this from existing: https://github.com/YosysHQ (if you have a supported device, these tools work quite well)
The limiting factor is that to support a given device it has to be reverse engineered since FPGA vendors don't want to provide the necessary details... that's the main issue.
adrian_b
8 months ago
The main obstacle in developing such software is not its complexity, but the fact that the FPGA manufacturers do not document the format of their bit streams that must be used to program a FPGA.
It is the same like the difficulty of making a compiler and assembler for a CPU for which the manufacturer does not document its machine language (like the NVIDIA GPUs, but at least NVIDIA documents an intermediate language that you can use as a target for your compiler, while the FPGA vendors do not document anything).
BigGreenJorts
8 months ago
I remember my college gf was really interested in FPGAs and was always talking to profs and their colleagues to get access to their tech stacks to play around, just to learn. I think she eventually got a job at a networking company like Cisco or other so hopefully got full time access.
4ntiq
8 months ago
> so criminal, rank ass, totally the gateway, empoweredearned, confines of the digital domain
are you an extra from Hackers?
SanjayMehta
8 months ago
Beaglebone RISC-V + FPGA
https://www.beagleboard.org/boards/beaglev-fire
That gives you access to ModelSIM via Microchip’s Libero suite.