Re: [oc] Volunteer for GPL'd CAD tool

[Ruben Leote Mendes <etruben@ua.pt>]

Hello,

On Fri, Mar 03, 2000 at 05:18:42PM +0100, MoT wrote:
> I feel really frustrated of the fact that it is impossible to do the whole
> design of a core under my favourite development plateform, namely
> GNU/Linux :) 

That makes two of us.

> So why not try to change this situation ? I suggest that the opencores
> project (and maybe other open hardware projects) officially publishes an
> open letter intended for FPGAs manufacturer (or individually mails
> them), asking them for donating complete specifications of their chip's
> configuration bitstream. In return, opencores.org would start a
> project of developping a GPL'd CAD tool which would target the chips of
> the manufacturer(s) answering this call.

I think this a good idea but to be honest I am not very optimistic about
the manufacturers cooperation. :-(
 
> As it would have a modular design, such a tool could have different
> frontends, the most important probably being for the AIRE IIR or FIR
> format (for integration with Savant and FreeHDL). One could add a frontend
> for the Jazz language netlist. Several backends for the different
> supported FPGA architectures would be implemented. Of course, if we
> obtained sponsoring from a FPGA manufacturer, I would volunteer for this
> project.

This is the program that gets the first place in my "Most Wanted" software
list right now. I think this program is as important to the free hardware
community as GCC is to the free software world!

I volunteer for helping such a project even if no manufacturer decides to
cooperate. I am willing to help reverse engineer the software and bitstream
if that is our only hope of having an open source tool to synthesize an FPGA.

I have a degree in electrical engineering and can code C and VHDL but I don't
have any clue about placing/routing/fitting algoritms. Anyone with this skills
is willing to help? Can someone recommend a good book/paper that covers
this topic?

> But one could wonder why FPGA manufacturers would accept this deal. Maybe
> am I only dreaming... However the recent decisions of hardware
> manufacturers (such as Creative Labs donating GPL'd driver for their
> SB Live) can give us some hope, though it is not exactly the same context.
> The Open Hardware movement is just at its beginning, but one could imagine
> (and it is probably the hope of everyone on this list) that it may become
> as important as the Open Software movement from an economical vuepoint. It
> could then look very attractive for a FPGA manufacturer to be the
> "official" sponsor of this movement, by giving complete specifications of
> their chips, and being the main target for cores designed by this
> community.

In the first days of Linux there were very few companies that provided the
information to write drivers. Unfortunately I believe that we will see the
same behaviour with the FPGA manufacturers. I hope I am wrong!

As a side note, I read in the slashdot story that getting your own custom
chip manufactured in a fab is not very expensive today because there is
lots of competition in the market. So it may be feasible to put some of
the "open cores" into real physical parts without using an FPGA. It probably
won't be cheap because of the low volume of production.
What if we designed an FPGA ourselves? So instead of manufacturing several 
different custom chips in low quantities we could manufacture our FPGA in large
quantities and use them to build the other systems. 
The price per chip would still be more expensive than an FPGA from a big 
manufacturer, but if you add software licensing cost to the equation the 
difference in real price gets much smaller.
Maybe this would "open the eyes" of some of the manufacturers and make them 
release the information necessary to program their devices. 

Do you think this has even a little chance of working?

-- 
Ruben Leote Mendes - etruben@ua.pt