[Noisebridge-discuss] FPGA experience/pointers/tips?

[Lamont Lucas]

Christoph Maier wrote:
> AFAIK both the freebie Xilinx ISE and Altera Quartus design tools speak
> both Verilog and VHDL.
> Are there open source compilers without the feature limitations of
> Xilinx's and Altera's free tools?

Check out icarus's iverilog (http://www.icarus.com/eda/verilog/). 

I used this to write modules and test them, viewing the waveforms in 
gtkwave or just as text, then when I had it right I used the free xilinx 
webpack tools to do the pin mapping and final compile.  ($display is 
your friend)

AFAIK, none of the major FPGA vendors have an open compiler that will 
actually generate the loadable bitstream, but you can at least do your 
development on unix in a text environment, then copy the resulting .v 
files over for a final compile.