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by gsmecher
909 days ago
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Xilinx/AMD doesn't make overt donations any more AFAIK, but they still subsidize hardware as a loss leader and for academics. For example, academic groups can buy the RFSoC 4x2 board for $2149 USD, which is a small fraction of the volume price of the chip that's on it. "EDA software is crap" is so close to an axiom around here that I think Vivado doesn't get the credit it deserves. The synthesis flow has been rapidly modernizing and supports a chunk of VHDL-2019. The bundled simulator still lags on support and features, for reasons that are pretty easy to understand. |
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That’s too bad. I once got a small pile (8?) of max-spec Virtex-5 chips, for free, FedExed from Xilinx. Xilinx apparently valued them so little that they didn’t even bother putting the full address on the envelope. Tracking it down was fun.
The only remotely supportable way to synthesize images for them was to run a primitive CentOS 5 container on a big server — the Windows version of the tools were still 32-bit, and 4G of address space was too little for the synthesis workflow. Even with the magic 64-bit RHEL/CentOS-only build, it would take 45 minutes or so for the tools to notice any errors during synthesis.
Fun times.