I don't get your objection or what you see as an alternative to modern FPGA
vendors. FPGA hardware is well documented by all 4 major vendors at a cell,
routing, and overall architecture level. Pick up a family handbook from one of
them and I think you'll be shocked at just how much gory detail is actually in
there - detailed almost down to a gate level. HDLs isolate you from having to
deal with manually connecting gate A to gate B times thousands of nets in a
relatively portable way.
I can't imagine you being an MPU/MCU fan as ABI licencors like ARM, MIPS, Intel,
Freescale, etc don't open source the gate level designs for 99% of the worlds
most popular CPUs either. FPGA are way more open and more documented in that
regard as you can instance your own designed CPU or a dozen open ones across
thousands of programmable devices both past and well into the future. And once
you prototype your own design, many FPGA vendors have ASIC services where you
can mask your chip in hard silicon then it really will be your own design you
can open source if you desire.
Tools from Xilinx, Altera, Lattice, and MicroSemi run on Linux as well as
Windows.
-Alan
On April 26, 2013 at 12:24 AM Mouse <mouse at rodents-montreal.org> wrote:
FPGAs (and
programmable logic in general) are a lot of fun despite
the somewhat steep learning curve.
Well...can be. Personally, having to use an undocumented binary blob
of a compiler - which, oh, by the way, almost certainly doesn't run on
either the OS or the CPU architecture I want to run it on, even if I
were willing to run it - kills the `fun' aspect dead.
If you find it fun despite such things? More power to you. I'll stick
to using my `fun' time for things that don't ick me out.
It's really hard to find GOOD FPGA
programmers out there
Given the "use this closed proprietary compiler to generate an opaque
blob which you throw at undocumented hardware" nature of FPGA dev, I'm
not surprised.
I suspect I'd be decent, possibly good, at FPGA programming. But until
either someone is willing to pay me to find out or the hardware gets
documented, that will remain unknown.
I doubt I'm _entirely_ alone in that.
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