this post was submitted on 28 May 2026
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Vivado is software for designing hardware on an FPGA. AMD bought out Xilinx, one of the big FPGA manufacturers, a few years back. FPGAs are basically programmable digital circuits: you configure a series of internal logic gates to represent the function of a circuit with memory, data busses, registers, gates, etc. In this fashion, an FPGA could be programmed to function like a CPU, a radio, a video encoder, or nearly any other piece of digital hardware. Very useful for hobbyists and prototyping.
The thing with FPGA software is that there are no open source alternatives. FPGAs have so many complicated blobs and signing keys and proprietary IP blocks that your only choice is to use the manufacturer's offering.
True, but that is not the only thing they are useful for; e.g. many high end measurement instruments ship with FPGAs so they can get improvements after release for functionality where implementing it in software would be too slow.
Very true. I believe FPGAs are also popular for aerospace applications, since it's cheaper to design and patch programmable hardware than to design and physically install ASICs.
It is insane to me that something as conceptually basic as FPGAs can even be made proprietary at all, much less that being the universal state of them.
Singularly fucking stupid IP gated moronicity. So much profit available before custom chips. Why?
Lattice device support some open toolchains, or relatively open compared to the big two. Or something like that, never got to work with them yet.
Thanks, that’s basically what I gathered from the article but I didn’t do any further research.