I got interested in FPGAs a few years ago out of a desire to design a toy processor for a Coursera class. I had a similar issue figuring out what board(s) to get, mostly because I didn't know what the number of gates could actually implement. I too ended up with an Atlys board, which is an impressive little beast.

When it came to learning an HDL, I got in contact with several people who worked on FPGAs and learned that most of the experience people seemed to be gaining is how to navigate the development environments. Each FPGA manufacturer has their own environment that only works for their own chips and only supports their own (or partner's) JTAG controllers. Each development environment is completely different and often a design-by-committee mess to navigate, let alone use.

So I continued like most in the direction of my first purchase and messed with Xilinx ISE. I could write pages about this tool (Doesn't support spaces in installation path, 15 gigabyte install, matlab-level licensing even for the free version, on linux first command to run before you use ISE is source settings64.sh, etc.).

Above all that, my primary issue is that while the synthesizing/place-and-route (FPGA form of compiling) work on linux, in the newer versions of ISE that no longer require broken kernel drivers, they incorrectly load libusb, so you have to LD_PRELOAD the library, and even then it only seems to correctly load a third of the time.

(shameless plug time)

I don't think anyone else should have to deal with this crap. I called BS, and started a project I (for now) call "Adapt" to make a tool that runs on all POSIX systems to be able to support all FPGA chips and all JTAG controllers with an easily-extensible code base.

Do note that this project does not synthesize or route for chips, only load the bit files onto the chips. Other work is being done on that.

I am currently working on re-implementing some JTAG controller firmware so the tool can be distributed without proprietary software, and after that I will get back to the core of the project, add testing, and finish the ability to support multiple chips.

http://diamondman.github.io/Adapt/

This project is very much in progress so this is just a heads up for now. However if anyone would like to contribute support for their favorite controller or chip, it would be greatly appreciated.

user:	jessydiamondman
created:	August 3, 2014
karma:	31