Are these mature already? It took some time for KiCad to get to current usable state and I don’t want to be early adopter. In fact, I want to have my private hardware MVP next year with current tools. On the other hand I can’t imagine my slacker colleagues using anything else than Vivado. Learning Vivado for them was already mission impossible.
I wouldn't say KiCad is usable yet. I've made multiple attempts to use it and it just is fundamentally user hostile. Unfortunately the devs see any attempt to improve user friendliness as "dumbing down".
Fortunately there is (finally!) an open source PCB design program that doesn't suck: Horizon EDA. I've only made one PCB with it but honestly it was pretty great and the author fixed every usability bug I reported in a matter of hours, which is an insane difference from KiCad's "you're holding it wrong".
The only think I don't like about it is it has an unnecessarily powerful and confusing component system (there are modules, entities, gates, etc.). But really it is the best by far.
Anyway, on FPGAs, I think the tools are only vaguely mature for iCE40 and even then you basically need to already be an expert unfortunately.
I've only recently starting designing PCBs and I started with KiCad, but I've found it to be very easy to use after watching one video of someone going through a simple board design.
So many things. It was a few years ago that I tried so I don't remember the specifics but it's just generally very unintuitive and makes questionable UI choices. E.g. when you move a component in the schematic the wires don't stay attached to it.
I didn't need a video to figure out how to use Horizon.
Thank you, I’ll look at it. Last time I wasn’t happy about KiCad’s differential lines. My design was space constrained and it was really hard to match lengths of short traces.
It is still in dev but I think it is way more usable than the Xilinx tools I guess.
I am curious to know if you are using Qemu by any chance to prototype your hardware. I am doing some work on Qemu to make prototyping easier of a custom hardware and would love the pain points.