| > bitstream ... Is that a sane expectation? No. Bitstream formats are not in any way compatible across devices. Because timing is a factor, even if you had the same physical layout of LUTs and routing, it's unlikely that your design would work. (From parent) > use that bitstream for any other device in the same device family Not at the bitstream level. However, you can take a place&routed chunk of logic and treat it as a unit. You can replicate it (without repeating P&R), move it around, copy it onto other devices in the same family. This is super useful as most FPGA applications have large repeating structures, but P&R doesn't know that it's a factorable unit. It'll repeat P&R for each instance and you'll get unpredictable timing characteristics. > Should manufacturers provide new formats closer to final form yet would allow binaries that can be adjusted, kind of like .a .so or even llvm? > would building whole images for many families of FPGA make sense You can license libraries that are a P&R'd blob and drop them into your design. There's no easy way to make this generalizable across devices without shipping the original RTL, and conversion from RTL->bitstream is where most of the pain lies. |