While each method has its advantages and disadvantages, HDLs generally offer the greatest design flexibility. Common design formats are schematic capture, hardware description language (HDL), or a combination of the two. The design process involves converting the requirements into a format that represents the desired digital function(s). The FPGA development stages are design, simulation, synthesis, and implementation, as shown in Figure 1. Regardless of your final product, FPGA designers must follow the same basic process. There have been many times when my FPGA knowledge has allowed me to detect and correct errors, such as wrong part numbers or misuse of terms and terminology found in requirements and other documents. A solid understanding will help you comprehend and extract relevant information for status reports, define schedule tasks, and allocate appropriate resources and time. The key to good communication is having an understanding of the development process. Good communication is important when technical leads, supervisors, managers, or systems engineers interface with FPGA designers. While the FPGA development process is second nature to embedded systems designers experienced in implementing digital designs on an FPGA, it can be confusing and difficult for the rest of us. They can be found in primary and secondary surveillance radar, satellite communication, automotive, manufacturing, and many other types of products. Over the last several years, the use of FPGAs has greatly increased in military and commercial products. Any amateur interested in Verilog should definitely give it a look.Working with FPGAs isn't intimidating when you know the basic techniques and options. I've not kept up with its development, but its apparently now cross platform and still under active development. I got a lot more sleep, and a lot more done. As a commuter student my last 2 years, not having to hang out waiting for time was awesome. Wrote a C++ program in that time, too, to generate exhaustive tests for all components. Wrote all of the components for a basic 8-bit ALU while watching with Mothman Propechies and sipping some Bourbon. I was sitting on my living room floor with my FreeBSD laptop punching out my project while others were waiting in line at 2am for lab time. It saved my ass, as I didnt have to compete for limited lab time on the few Solaris boxes with the proprietary tools we used in my VLSI class while studying EE. Open source, used to only support FreeBSD (my first BSD exposure), but is cross platform. I used this extensively when I was in college around 2002. I'm surprised no one has mentioned Icarus Verilog. FPGA vendors are in the business of selling _silicon_ so they pretty much see the toolchain as an operational cost.
Proprietary fpga simulation tools software#
Simulators are in the business of selling you software so they have pressure to actually deliver quality software. You can see the difference if you compare FPGA vendor software with HDL simulation software. It's not like their customers are gonna run away to a non existent competition they still need to buy CPU's and they would be stuck with their 'barely works' toolchain. How much pressure would they have in providing a high quality toolchain? Imagine also that they would provide you with this compiler for free, such that their business model was entirely based on them selling their CPU's. Imagine a world without gcc or llvm and only Intel or AMD could provide you with a compiler. The problem again (in my very speculative opinion) is that you have a very limited set of vendors who have a complete lock down on their hardware. You will find that a lot of people simply use their text editor of choice and then just use the vendor's tool whenever absolutely necessary with a 7 foot pole (from a script or CLI if possible). The reality is that nowadays HDL teams are composed of a lot of people with CS and CE background, who are obviously aware of sane development processes and practices. Perhaps there is some truth in your assessment but I think the lack of pressure on tool support is more related to the lack of industry-grade alternatives, more so than HDL teams clinging on to a desire of developing like it's 1989.