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[ox] FPGAs (was: Re: Die Anwendbarkeit ...)



Hi Graham,

some more questions about FPGAs:

graham belegost.mit.edu schrieb:
such as you describe for some years. And in fact there are groups
working on designs for FPGAs (eg OpenCores). BUT commercial users
of such chips are very worried that their designs may be too easily
copied.

This means that FPGAs once programed can be read and reasembled?
Or can be copied from those chips to another?

As a result, they put pressure on the FPGA manufacturers
to make it difficult to get at the internals of the chips. The
manufacturers are happy to co-operate for their own reasons. 

Generally FPGA manufactures are interessed in increasing their
production - whether for "free", "illegal" or "normal" products.
Right?

The result
is that the internal data format for FPGAs is a secret. No-one can write
free software to program the chips (the manufacturers do release
some 'free beer' programs

What means 'free beer' program? A proprietary program which some
limited features (limited time)?

to do this). There was one FPGA design
which was inherently open - the programming data from the chip could
be read and changed at any time from a normal processor bus. The
company which made it was bought by Xilinx (the Microsoft of the
FPGA world) and production closed after a couple of years. There
are no other FPGAs with this property, and Xilinx are very aggressive
about their patents (they just won a patent case against their
nearest competitor, Altera).

Why is Xilinx so aggressive to keep their design closed - because of
the pressure you mentioned above? And what about the competitor?
Aren't they interessed in generating a market and therefore in
making their design free?

This makes it difficult to think about
producing a 'free' FPGA (quite apart from the fact that no-one
has yet produced a free IC of any type, though some groups are
trying. Free electronic design groups are split over whether it
is possible to produce free designs using non-free software (I
guess the majority opinion is 'yes').

Does any useful non-free software for programming the FPGAs exist?
Or is it only this type of 'free beer' program?

Maybe silly questions, but I am not very familiar with such stuff.

Are you on CCC 27th to 29th of dec in Berlin?

Thanx,
Stefan

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