Are there any open or at least standard FPGAs that the open source community flock to? Last time I looked into FPGAs, it was mostly closed architecture and proprietary tools
Are there any open or at least standard FPGAs that the open source community flock to? Last time I looked into FPGAs, it was mostly closed architecture and proprietary tools
One flock-to is Lattice ICE40 series. Decent support from Yosys for hobby stuff at least. Possibly Go-win. You can develop for many of the affordable FPGAs with free versions of the proprietary tools. As for "closed architecture" it depends what you mean, the architecture of all FPGAs that I know of is documented, the tools show you how your design was mapped onto the hardware. The proprietary stuff includes the timing model that drives the static timing analysis and timing-aware place and route.
Not for anything mid to higher range, but I believe there's open source tooling for some of the older Lattice and Xilinx parts. I would say for me it's not as big a deal as on the software side, because each vendor's hardware tends to be pretty different from each other anyway.
Dang, sounds like there’s still a bit of lock in. That’sa shame
I think there will always be vendor lock in. The same way there have been architectural differences between Intel and AMD's x86, or even stuff like one specific chip/family tanking performance because one instruction was implemented differently, you won't be able to guarantee efficient utilization of different vendor/families.
For example, I've taken code optimized for Xilinx, ran it for another vendor, and resource count ballooned because stuff that was built-in/free on one wasn't on the other. It's a lot of work to truly make generic code and usually just means switching out modules per vendor.