First, just wanted to say that I find this topic really interesting. I'm trying to understand who the target user is for open-source FPGA tools.
For many hardware companies, the risk of using an unproven tool is too severe. Unlike software, you can't just push out a patch if there is a bug. I mean, in theory, I guess you can since FPGAs are reconfigurable, but it is probably not very straightforward from a deployment point of view (I actually don't know so feel free to correct me).
So, since you cannot push out fixes easily, it's quite scary for the engineering teams to work with unproven tools. For the consumer electronic space, product life-cycles are quite short (mobile phones get updated every year!). So you definitely don't want to risk cutting into your product's time-to-market due to bugs in the FPGA tools.
Also, the bigger the company, the more likely that they will have high-priority direct-support from the FPGA Vendors. Whereas, it's probably harder to get support for open-source tools. So I can't see consumer electronic companies choosing open-source tools.
So again, I'm not against this work at all! Just trying to understand the target audience.
For many hardware companies, the risk of using an unproven tool is too severe. Unlike software, you can't just push out a patch if there is a bug. I mean, in theory, I guess you can since FPGAs are reconfigurable, but it is probably not very straightforward from a deployment point of view (I actually don't know so feel free to correct me).
So, since you cannot push out fixes easily, it's quite scary for the engineering teams to work with unproven tools. For the consumer electronic space, product life-cycles are quite short (mobile phones get updated every year!). So you definitely don't want to risk cutting into your product's time-to-market due to bugs in the FPGA tools.
Also, the bigger the company, the more likely that they will have high-priority direct-support from the FPGA Vendors. Whereas, it's probably harder to get support for open-source tools. So I can't see consumer electronic companies choosing open-source tools.
So again, I'm not against this work at all! Just trying to understand the target audience.