scottchin

Thinking about this topic some more, it seems hard to gain the critical-mass of contributors for such an open-source tool.

Place-and-route for example, requires a very specific set of knowledge in both optimization (comp-sci), and hardware (electrical). Most of the people who have these skill sets are probably already employed by the major FPGA vendors and under NDA to not contribute to such an open-source tool. I've seen this first-hand having been in the academic space of FPGA research. New masters and phd grads typically go straight to Xilinx or Altera. And without really really good place-and-route, you won't have a competitive tool.

I'm not sure how you would solve this problem.

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.

Having done my graduate studies in FPGA architecture and software, I can definitely see where the author is coming from. In fact, it seems like the entire hardware development industry has to face the issue of most tools being closed-source. Although I don’t have a solution for the technology specific phases (Place and Route, Bit Stream Generation, etc.), I am actually part of a company that is trying to help solve this problem higher up in the tool chain.

One of the biggest barriers to developing EDA (electronic design automation) software tools is knowing all the nuances of the various hardware-description languages like VHDL, Verilog and System Verilog. We learned this the hard way through our previous startup (later acquired) which built a hardware verification tool.

I don’t want to be self-promoting here, but in case anyone in this thread is interested, we are building a platform called Invio that lets you build your own EDA tools. We try to solve more than just the language support side of things and all of our platform’s inputs and outputs are open standards: Python, TCL, Verilog, SystemVerilog, VHDL, etc. You can look at my profile to find more info, or google “Invio”.

One of the major challenges in creating a competitive FPGA architecture is tuning the architecture. Commercial vendors do this tuning through direct insight into their customer's designs. And since the vendors have a large portfolio of customer designs, they have a lot of data points to perform this tuning. That's one of the many reasons why we haven't seen a successful FPGA startup in a long time (decades probably). Kind of like a chicken and the egg problem.

Congrats on the release and thanks for open-sourcing! I downloaded it and left a positive review!

Thanks for the links. I wasn't clear. I didn't mean to imply that what the source was saying is not possible. Since I wasn't familiar with the credibility of RPS (which I now hear is very credible), I just felt like reading the article didn't tell me anything concrete.

Although I'm not thrilled with the launch experience and DRM of SimCity, I don't think that this article adds any validity due to everything coming from an anonymous source.

> And to get us back in your good graces, we’re going to offer you a free PC download game from the EA portfolio.

I can't help but think of the "20$ off your next purchase" pre-order bonus. Which, if you read the fine print, must be used within 2 weeks, and from a select list of really old games, and only applies to a purchase of 30$.

Looks great! Congrats on the release!

Did you work on this game by yourself or with other people?

Did you use any existing game frameworks like Cocos2D or Unity?

Congratulations! And thanks for writing this post. I find these types of post from developers extremely insightful and inspiring.

I particularly found your experience with improving Chinese SEO very interesting.

Keep up the good work!