(V)HDL Toolsets

[David Kuder]

I've taken to using parts supported by the open source toolchains & IP,
that mostly limits me to using Lattice parts, but the efficiencies obtained
from not instancing all the extra garbage from a vendor's IP library is
worth it.  When you use the vendor tools, they want to waste as many gates
as they can get away with so you buy larger more expensive parts.  The open
source toolchains optimize out stuff that would just get left dangling.

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5018 gives a good overview of what
this can look like and the NeTV2 is a project that uses the migen/litex
toolchain well.

On Thu, May 21, 2020, 7:34 AM Sytse van Slooten via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

> If you’re targeting FPGA hardware (opposed to a design for a foundry, or a
> design you want to run exclusively in a simulator), it is kind of
> inevitable that you work with the toolchains that the hardware vendor
> supplies. Would be nice if you could choose freely from competing
> toolchains, but the hardware isn’t exactly open, so that’s not going to
> happen.
>
> So basically what it comes down to is Quartus or Vivado. I’ve kind of
> implicitly chosen Quartus, because the Altera based development boards tend
> to be a lot nicer and cheaper than the Xilinx based stuff. I haven’t even
> followed the upgrades from ISE to Vivado.
>
> Not sure if the level of doggyness is any different between those, it’s
> more like getting to know the specific bugs and working around them. Can be
> pretty annoying at times though. For instance, one of the things Quartus
> doesn’t get is that if source files are changed, it might make sense to
> recompile - it only gets that if you change sources through its own editor.
> Not really a big problem maybe, but it shows that the tools are far from
> friendly.
>
> One of the things I’ve done with my pdp11 vhdl from the start is that I’ve
> not used any vendor specific constructs or language extensions. That’s
> probably the only design decision that I’m still really happy about - it
> allows me to change to another vendor and another tool chain at will.
>
> Cheers
> Sytse
>
> > On 21 May 2020, at 04:22, Jay Jaeger via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
> wrote:
> >
> > As I wrote in my last post, but write here for use as a separate thread:
> >
> > I'd be interesting in hearing from folks what toolsets they have used
> > for HDL (VHDL in particular).  I started with Xilinx ISE and then
> > graduated to Vivado for later chipsets - unfortunately, Vivado seems to
> > be something of a dog, in terms of time to compile HDL and synthesize
> logic.
> >
> > JRJ
> >
>
>