[simias]

This is unfortunately still the norm in the FPGA world, which I think is a poor decision in the long term for Intel/Xilinx. I wanted to seriously get into FPGA dev a decade or so ago, I learned to write Verilog and everything but the tooling made me give up, it was too painful to deal with all the quirks and limitations of the free tools.

[latchkey]

It is possible to download and use the Xilinx tools for free. My company sells bare metal access to FPGA's and our customers do it all the time.

I agree with the tooling being a nightmare though. It is a 80gb+ install that fails half the time.

[sigsev_251]

You forgot that it crashes in random times and that the text editor refuses to open files because sigasi can't be initialized

[latchkey]

I didn't forget, I just didn't get past the install. ;-)

[simias]

I admit I'm mostly familiar with the Intel (formerly Altera) side. There are no restrictions at all on the Xilinx side? That's pretty neat.

[latchkey]

You sign up on their website and click ok on the long eula nobody reads and then click download. So yea, there are probably restrictions, but they don't have a paywall in front of them. This isn't legal advice at all.