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Comment by mastax | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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.

I could order MOQ (minimum order quantity) of anywhere from 100-500 depending upon range. I didn't need to be an LLC, but it sure helps to actually know the lingo and understand how to deal with distributors and FAEs (field application engineers).

One thing you absolutely have to remember is that when it comes to distributors and FAEs is that as an individual you are wasting their time. Talking to anyone other than you is more profitable. Nevertheless, most won't ignore you (sales is their job, after all) but you very definitely have to make their lives as easy as possible and understand that you get their time after they have serviced everybody more profitable.

Tariffs made everything miserable because the FAEs and salespeople were up to their earballs dealing with the daily price swings of customers with actual volumes.

> 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.

Support is stuck at the old levels--none of the GW5 series are implemented. This is just like how the Lattice support is similarly stuck at the ice40/ECP5 level which is almost a decade old.

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.

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