[odmkSeijin]

I understand there is some validity with this criticism. Xilinx has always been slow to adopt standard software development practices. But really, Xilinx tools have never cost 'multi-tens of thousand dollar's. The most expensive tools are several thousand dollars. There are also free tools for smaller devices / certain flows. Source control is done with tcl scripting (simple text files) and standard source control tools. It's not as bad as it was in the past. Cheers.

[moftz]

Microsemi Libero is a joke and is probably the greatest hindrance to getting actual work done. I wish Xilinx bought them out instead of Microchip so there could actually be some improvement to the tools. You can throw every bit of computing resource at it's dinosaur PnR tool and it will just happily chug along at 1% CPU usage. They just came out with some update that made a 20% improvement to PnR, literally hours of time gained back from watching a wheel spin. What is it doing? Who knows, it will probably fail and not tell you why. Zero source control, almost zero documentation for scripting, and a design tool that seems nearly crash everything just to tell you there are IP core updates available.

The only parts that actually work reliably are whatever ancient Actel-branded tools are hidden in the suite.