Looking for a device programmer that doesn't require Weendoze

Tony> I have yet to find a reasomably complex PLD (that is something Tony> more than one of the ispGALs) that is 100% documented. That is Tony> to say that you can go from logic equations to chip without any Tony> proprietary software, either the logic compiler or the Tony> programming software. That's a good point though I think the big issue there is the early steps. The programming itself is often easy since it doesn't use odd voltages or timings, just a plain bitstream clocked in via a serial port. One of the FPGA vendors created a particularly clean setup called "Jaz" (forgot who -- Altera?), I wrote software to drive that which was quite painless. But the real issue is that NO ONE will tell you the internals of their FPGA, so you can't figure out the bit patterns that you need to perform a given logic function. Too bad really, because the logic synthesis software available from the chip vendors often sucks pretty badly. I have a bunch of battle scars coping with really stupid bugs in Lattice tools, which will not be fixed since they are apparently considered normal behavior. I think if you have infinite pull the situation is sometimes better -- I've seen some evidence that DEC was able to get Xilinx to tell it how to synthesize for those chips. And they did it much better... but those were research tools in the Palo Alto group only. paul