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And finally, someone will need to start shipping FPGAs with a standardized interface on commodity hardware.

If Apple included an FPGA in their machines with some cool sounding marketing name like Particle Accelerator™ it would probably catch on.

The last time I looked into FPGA programming (probably back when I was in college), the cheap eval hardware cost at least a few hundred dollars a board, if not a few thousand.

Not sure when you were in college, but we used FPGAs in my upper level computer engineering courses, circa 2006, and the Xilinx dev boards we used were about $120.

> Another big step would be building a reasonable toolchain around it that does not consist of big clunky proprietary tools with onerous licensing.

While I think a toolchain other than Xilinx or Altera is out of the question due to technical complexity, Quartus Web Edition is free and supports the low-cost Cyclone devices including the ones with ARM cores (SoC): (pdf) http://www.altera.com/literature/po/ss_quartussevswe.pdf. I imagine Xilinx has something similar.

> And finally, there's a bootstrapping problem. FPGAs aren't really a mass-market platform, because no one has them (unless they're developing custom hardware).

Yes, that's the chicken/egg problem that both Xilinx and Altera are addressing by putting ARM cores on their devices that run just fine without any FPGA configuration at all. It's an appeal to software developers while pitching the FPGA hardware as a super-special add-on feature really cool to have for ... something.

Altera has just started shipping the first SoC devices I think, about 6 months or so behind Xilinx. Now we'll see if the strategy works...

The problem with eval boards is the tendency to explode price upward by sticking peripherals on the board. Sure, a 10/100 ethernet intf sounds cool and it'll only add $5... times 50 other devices and next thing you know you have one of those cool, but expensive Digilent boards that has more I/O options than you could ever use, but costs $200.

If you just want a nearly bare FPGA google for "micronova fpga mercury" and for $60 you get a DIP-64 circuit board with quite a few I/O and that's about it. No on board graphic LCD. No on board VGA output jack and D/A interface. Think, the basic stamp from 20 years ago, now a FPGA dev tool. I have one sitting on my desk waiting to fool around with it (I have a lot on my desk...)

Also all the software is free now. Maybe limited such that you need a license to synthesize for a $2000 chip, which doesn't matter. Pretty much if your average garage hacker can afford the dev board, the limits on the software don't matter. Closed source, but available for linux and windows and free.

Papilio one and papilio pro are both under $100

Vendor - https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11158

OEM - http://papilio.cc/

You can have a small FPGA test board here http://be.eurocircuits.com/shop/offtheshelf/product.aspx?&an... for 60€. The tutorials (non-free) can be found there http://www.elektor.com/magazines/2012/december/taming-the-be...

That only addresses the one point (expense of the test boards), which as I pointed out, is the one major problem that has been solved (I consider a $90 dev board reasonably affordable for tinkering, so a $70 dev board is better, but not by much).

It doesn't seem to solve the other two problems, though I suspect that solving the second (lack of open tools) would go a long way towards solving the third as well (ubiquity of hardware available to target).

The proprietary software is always going to be there (unfortunately).

The precise hardware layout of an FPFA is important for performance and a trade secret. Proprietary software algorithms can squeeze more out of the fixed hardware.

If proprietary software is why I'm not buying an FPGA (and if there are a lot of people like me) there will be much more to be made opening things up than keeping things closed. Not saying that this is the case, just that it could be, so "always" might be an overstatement.

I hope you're right, I work at Red Hat after all.

However I still don't think it's likely. The trouble is this is all tied to the hardware. FPGAs are integrated circuits with a complexity and development cost close to that of CPUs. (The fact that you can only use about 4% of the density of the FPGA is beside the point here). Because of this huge barrier to entry -- building your own fab -- we don't have fully open source x86-compatible high end processors, and we don't have open FPGAs either.

As long as the hardware is closed, the software for doing FPGA design is also going to be closed, for the reasons I outlined in my comment above.

Yeah, it's more hope than expectation; it just seems unlikely not absurd though.

If you're interested in a non-proprietary toolflow, you can try taking a look at VPR (http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/vpr/). It's an academic place and route tool out of the University of Toronto. You may still need to use some parts of the proprietary toolflow. I've never used it to actually run on an FPGA, but it's a popular tool for academic research in FPGA design and EDA algorithms.

http://www.adafruit.com/products/451