Open Source FPGA Tooling, Our Journey from Resistance to Adoption

Tim Saxe & Brian Faith

This talk will take you on our journey from resistance to adoption of something unthinkable - An FPGA company adopting Open Source FPGA Tooling.

We are at a tipping point in the semiconductor industry. Companies are demonstrating that you can build a successful business model based on open source; just look at the accelerating adoption rate that RISC-V ISA is seeing in the processor space. And yet this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how disruptive open source hardware can become to the semiconductor industry.

Since the inception of our industry, the vendor-supported FPGA development tools have been proprietary and closed source. Initially this was simply because that is the way things were done – there were no open standards. But over time, keeping them closed and proprietary enabled a level of influence and control over users. If a designer liked your software, they tended not to change, and that implicitly makes your user base captive.

Open source FPGA tools have been around for a long time, being used primarily by hobbyists and in academia. Over the past few years, this situation has evolved, with an increasing number of new developers with software backgrounds gravitating towards open source FPGA development tools, including design teams at some of the largest companies in the electronics industry.

So, why do FPGA companies still resist them?

Not Invented Here? Fear? Control?

This talk will serve two purposes:
1. To show how one company is building its future on top of open source FPGA tools
2. To share how we arrived at our decision in the hope that others will soon take the same leap.

Sat Jan 23 14:25:00 2021 at Rusty R. Hall