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Message
From: Günter Dannoritzer<dannoritzer@w...>
Date: Tue Jul 31 10:50:30 CEST 2007
Subject: [oc] future of open source fpga design tools
vkataev@m... wrote:
> Hello Cores,
>
> I am sorry if my question isn't directly related to the theme of this
> mailing list,
> but maybe could someone please help me to understand,
> what is the general difficulties in creating open source tools for
> digital design/synthesis ?
You should look in the archive of this list. There has been a lengthy
discussion about this topic a few years ago (2004). Even Richard
Stallman took part in it.
It will give you some insight about the problem.
>
> I suppose it is the same problem like in the case of open source drivers
> (e.g. ATI or NVIDIA), because HW Developers do not open their
> specifications. But, on the other side, using proprietary FPGA-design
> tools you can inspect FPGA ICs interior very precisely.
I think the main problem is that there is not a big group of people
willing to tackle the problem. At the end when I look how people reverse
engineer WLAN chips to write the driver, take for example the bc4xx, the
task to figure out the FPGAs cannot be that much harder.
But look at opencores. There are not many projects with more than two
developers. And the people doing the projects want to spend the time to
use the tools to do their logic development and not develop the tools.
Also most of the people are Electrical Engineers and not Software
Engineers and it is hard to convince a Software Engineer to develop a
software as open source that s/he will probably never use him/her self.
A good example for this is Icarus Verilog the simulator/synthesis tool.
It is getting developed all these years by mainly one person.
Cheers,
Guenter
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