Hardware vs Simh (and FPGA)

On Apr 27, 2013, at 3:35 PM, Dave wrote: Well, sometimes you have to fix things that the synthesis tool gets wrong. Sometimes you just need the extra performance; it's a lot like the situations in which you'd need to write assembly in software these days. There are actually a number of third-party synthesis tools that are commercially available; they synthesize the initial intermediate netlist that the manufacturer's tool can do the final mapping to a real device and fitting to said device. There are various reasons to do that; portability is a big one (not only between FPGA families, but also e.g. to ASICs), but performance is another. The netlists that come from the commercial synthesis tools can be somewhat faster or smaller than the ones from the manufacturers' tools; these days, though, at least Altera and Xilinx do pretty good synthesis. I know at least Icarus Verilog used to have a synthesis target, but my recollection is that it's been somewhat defunct for a while now (the synthesis target, not Icarus). All three of those are extremely cool. I need to get a Spartan 6 board now, I guess. :-) Oh, sure. No argument there. I'm just always surprised when people suggest making e.g. a VGA controller with an Arduino, because it seems like powering a boat with a motorcycle to me. Yeah, I don't retire for... a while now. It makes it hard to find the spare time, for sure. - Dave