16 Mar
2005
16 Mar
'05
5:32 p.m.
FWIW it still takes a good (8 hour) day to get one
turnaround
of the code for our FPGAs (and that's using high-spec PCs).
So not much better then. The FPGAs have presumably become more complex as
the PCs to compile them get faster...
This was true three years ago too, so I presume that,
barring
any great breakthrough, things will remain the same (at least
for the complex sorts of FPGAs we[1] do).
OTOH hand-wiring something equivalent would keep you occupied
a bit longer than a day I should think :-)
Oh yes. But the point it is took many, many, compiles to get the darn
thing to work. I am sure I could have hand-wired it in less time than
that. If you need to make a change to a hand-wired design, it takes,
perhaps, 5 minutes. To do it to the FPGA design means another overnight
compile.
Maybe I am terminally clueless (well, I am, but...) , but I prefer to
design a bit, build it, test it, design the next part, and so on. Doing
that in an FPGA seems to be totally impractical with the long compile times.
-tony