http://potential.ventures

"EDA desperately in need of an Open Source SystemVerilog front-end."

Chris Merck ‏@chrismerck

Mario Vigliar ‏@mvigliar please keep me in the loop :-) working with icecube on a 5lp4k is a nightmare

Russel from nandland.com:

"First of all, Clifford thanks so much for the great tools. With a brand-new install of Ubuntu, I performed exactly the instructions that you outlined on the Project Icestorm website and I was able to build and program my FPGA dev board (The Nandland Go Board) surprisingly easily! This was easier and less work than the official Lattice programmer for Linux. I got hung up in package dependency hell with the Lattice tools."

Dirk Hohndel from Intel:

"Linux Kernel development proceeds at an insane and still increasing pace"

Laurent Desseignes, Microcontroller Ecosystem Marketing Manager of STMicroelectronics:

"The Linux community is known to attract creative free-thinkers who are adept at sharing ideas and solving challenges efficiently" Link

Yann LeCun: inventor of convolutional neural networks:

"But perhaps more interesting is the idea that FPGAs are the reconfigurable device that might next on the neural network agenda for processing the larger nets (while GPUs remain the high performance training mechanism). In a very interesting admission, LeCun told The Platform that Google is rumored to be building custom hardware to run its neural networks and that this hardware is said to be based on FPGAs."  Link

Bastien Nocera

The biggest hurdle was getting the WiFi driver to work. The tablet used a Realtek chip and he was able to get a "code drop" driver from the company. The driver included all sorts of generic USB code that was unneeded. Eventually, I cut out all of the excess code—reducing the size of the driver by a factor of 20.

Link

Chung from Microsoft:

The idea is to use FPGAs, field-programmable gate arrays, chips that can be reconfigured to implement any design and that can be very power-efficient. Microsoft began using FPGAs to power parts of its Bing search engine last year.

Using FPGAs does come with drawbacks, for example the work that has to be done to program them to do the work at hand.  Link

Timingviolation:

Xilinx and IMO Altera are buggy as hell. In Altera land I have recently been burned by the Qsys to Eclipse monstrosity. I wish these tools targeted a lower level. Qsys and Eclipse are way too automatic and high level for the ridiculous amount of bugs they seem to have. Sure the ref designs work but add something slightly more complex and it creates HW problems in opaque and frustrating ways. Link

"If you look at Xilinx’s tools, for instance, they look nicely integrated, they look like they do a good job synthesizing/implementing things, and modern FPGAs are *so big* that honestly, what the tools do looks like magic.

But then go and open the FPGA editor, and look at the design carefully – and in a *lot* of cases, the tool is just monumentally stupid for what you’re trying to do: because *there’s no way to tell it* what you’re trying to do. There aren’t any attributes, or constraints, or macros available to pass that information along.

You can actually *still fix this* yourself, by implementing the FPGA directly in the editor as a hard macro, and using that hard macro. But Xilinx’s FPGA editor hasn’t been updated in forever – it’s ungodly buggy, and it takes a ton of time to do even simple things. It can’t even handle the fact that the FPGA has symmetry – so you have to build “left-hand side” macros, and “right-hand side” macros, even though you’re trying to say “use the thing closest to this other thing.” Link