[IshKebab]

Yeah I think it will always be that way though because there's no real reason for hobbyists to design a custom IC - anything they can afford to get manufactured could be done on an FPGA.

Still, even the open source FPGA tooling is very far behind the commercial software, and there is a reason for hobbyists to use FPGAs. I really hope it improves eventually.

I'm not very hopeful though. My experience of switching from the software industry to the hardware industry has shown me that most hardware people are just really bad at software and also don't really care about it. (Which is kind of weird because hardware design is really just programming for an unusual target platform.)

The fact that Verilator exists and mostly works is a big outlier.

[kayson]

Agreed. There's a great episode on the Microarch Club podcast (#10) about open source tooling and Verilator specifically. While Verilator is in an impressive state, it doesn't get any use by the big players.

[huppeldepup]

  there's no real reason for hobbyists to design a custom IC - anything they can afford to get manufactured could be done on an FPGA.

Except if you work on a mac. No fpga for apple.

[IshKebab]

"Hmm no FPGA software for Mac, I guess I will have to design a custom ASIC instead...", said nobody.