Comment on Using open source tools for FPGA development
Treczoks@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
The point is while you can do generic verilog or VHDL development on free tools, as soon as you want to implement it, you’ll need the vendor’s proprietary tools, regardless where you turn to.
Xilinx with Vivado is by far the worst. If you think Windows and Office play the vendor-lock-in hard, Xilinx plays it way harder. Once you develop with their stuff, you’ll have a hard time getting anywhere else. And Xilinx is rather unfriendly to smaller shops. Yes, if you buy millions of chips or you are at a university, they blow sugar in your ass. Outside that, they happily fuck you over.
If you want to be as free and open as possible, Vivado is by far the worst choice you could do.
The only two FPGAs I can buy that has a reasonable price and has the specs I want are both Xilinx FPGAs (Arty S7-50, Arty A7-100T).
I kinda have to use Vivado. Even though I hate bloated software like Vivado I think it would help me in the industry to know them.
What features bind you to those particular chips?
DDR3 RAM and local availability.
We have 3 options here. Altera SoCs (I hate Quartus with a burning passion), Xilinx FPGAs/SoCs and small Lattice FPGAs and Tang Nano 9k.
socsa@piefed.social 13 hours ago
Xilinx is the best reason to never get into FPGA work. I have dabbled on and off over the years, but every fucking time the tool chain just leaves me exhausted and willing to sacrifice as much SWAP as necessary to get FPGAs far away from my project.