Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 24 Apr 2003 16:35:54 -0400 | From | Timothy Miller <> | Subject | Re: Flame Linus to a crisp! |
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Linus Torvalds wrote:
>On Thu, 24 Apr 2003, Timothy Miller wrote: > > >>For their smaller devices, Xilinx has a free "WebPack" which is a >>complete Verilog synthesizer (I don't know if it does VHDL), as well as >>place & route, of course. I think it'll do up to Virtex II 250. It >>also tends use fewer gates for a given design than the version of >>Leonardo Spectrum we have. It just doesn't have a simulator, which is >>vital to any good development process. Also, the Web Pack only runs >>under Windows. Maybe it'll work with WINE? >> >> > >It does work with wine - but it's sad how horrible the command line tools >are (they were apparently first done under UNIX, and then ported to >Windows, and they got the Windows command line interface and trying to use >them in a sane way with Wine is not exactly much fun). > >But yes, with Wine and a few scripts you can actually make the tools >usable under Linux - I tried them out and had a small silly "pong" game >running on one of those things (a 100k device on one of the cheap >development boards). > >I have to admit that I would hate to actually use those tools for any real >work, though. > > > Where I work we have used the Web Pack (5.1, I believe) for "real work", although you can't trust its static timing. Beyond a certain utilization, it completely lies to you, and we can't get it to work right, no matter how much we over-constrain a design. All we can do is synthesize and then thoroughly test in real hardware (which isn't hard to do when all you're doing is a simple pixel-processing pipeline -- either it works, or you get obvious sprinkless all over the monitor screen). If that doesn't work, we get really clever to reduce area, or we go to a bigger device. What can you do with free but closed-source software? :) Designing for FPGA's is a real pain. Although the ASIC I did was a lot more complex, the process was a lot more straight-forward and the tools didn't lie to you.
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