[mastax]

My prediction is one of the Chinese FPGA makers will embrace open source, hire a handful of talented open source contributors, and within a handful of years end up with tooling that is way easier to use for hobbyists, students, and small businesses. They use this as an inroad and slowly move upmarket. Basically the Espressif strategy.

Xilinx, Altera, and Lattice are culturally incapable of doing this. For lattice especially it seems like a no brainer but they don’t understand the appeal of open source still.

[tverbeure]

Define “upmarket” ?

For me, that means higher capacity and advanced blocks such as SERDES, high-speed DRAM interfaces etc.

The bottleneck in using these kind of FPGAs has rarely been the tools, it’s the amount of time it takes to write and verify correct RTL. That’s not an FPGA specific problem, it applies to ASIC just the same.

I don’t see how GoWin and other alternative brands would be better placed to solve that problem.

[bsder]

> My prediction is one of the Chinese FPGA makers will embrace open source

Sadly, this doesn't seem to be panning out because the Chinese domestic market has perfectly functional Xilinx and Altera clones for a fraction of the price. Consequently, they don't care about anything else.

It irritates me to no end that Gowin won't open their bitstream format because they'd displace a bunch of the low end almost immediately.

[15155]

> It irritates me to no end that Gowin won't open their bitstream format because they'd displace a bunch of the low end almost immediately.

All of their IDE/programmer/etc binaries are basically entirely unprotected, almost all of their chips are entirely implemented in https://github.com/YosysHQ/apicula - if other manufacturers cared to implement it, it wouldn't be hard.

[hmry]

Gowin seemingly doesn't even sell the chips to individuals. Either set up an LLC so you can request samples from a destributor, or desolder one from a sipeed dev kit.

[15155]

Gowin and Efinix's tools are extremely spartan compared to Vivado or Quartus: they're pretty much straight HDL to bitstream compilers. There's also a FOSS implementation flow available for the Gowin chips (but I haven't used it.)

HDL isn't getting any easier, though, and that's where most of the complexity is.