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Comment by PAPPPmAc | Hacker News Reader

Last I looked Microchip's Libero FPGA/FPGASoC development tools were paid, either on an expensive one-time fee for a specific version, or an expensive-compared-to-this-board annual subscription. It won't even show me current pricing without logging in, which is a bad sign, and none of the press has mentioned if these come with a comped board-locked license or something to make them tenable for hobbyists.

The big FPGA players have mostly quit that shit; AMD/Xilinx, Intel/Altera/Whatever dumb name its about to be spun back out as, and Lattice all have free versions of their dev tools for at least their parts small players can afford. They just want you to buy chips and IP.

I haven't heard of the Yosis folks making a PolarFire backend, so I don't think there's an open alternative.

Libero is even FlexLM based licensing like the bad old days of proprietary dev tools.

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You can generate yourself a free Libero Silver license, which needs regenerating every year, but yes flexlm is annoying.

Seems the MPFS025T is not supported on the silver license unfortunately

The product table says that MPFS025 works with the free Silver license. Only the -S (security) versions require a paid license. Meaning, the MPFS025T has a free license, but the other MPFS025TS would not.

When searching for hardware part numbers, you should first omit the letters at the end, and then read carefully about what they mean.

Not only that, but you can flash an MPF*S with a non-S version. You only lose the "security" features (read: anti-tampering and debug prevention)

The product table I saw says "MPF100 (non 'S' devices)", and then I checked their MPF100 family comparison page and saw that no "MPFS*" devices were listed there. Is there a more informative product table on some page? Or how is one expected to know that MPFS025 is a "MPF100 non S" device? Genuine question, I am curious

https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/fpgas-and-plds/fpga...

Then click on the link "Libero license selector guide" to download the Excel spreadsheet. Filter or search for MPFS025.

Microchip does Excel spreadsheet selector guides for everything. As a general guideline when dealing with hardware components, don't trust anything you read on a web page.

Ah, thank you!

They even switched to mandatory yearly renewals a while back when Libero SoC launched. Buy a copy of Libero Gold for $999? You lose access after 365 days unless you renew. Every license tier used to be perpetual upon purchase, but now a single node perpetual license is some ridiculous bullshit like $20,000 USD.

At least when you buy Vivado and Quartus you can actually keep using it...

Thought I might have accidentally navigated to Slacker News for a moment there. Logging in, I can see that there's a big blue button that says "Request Free License".

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