Honored Contributor
Honored ContributorHi,
there are also a lot of free cores at opencores.org, while their usage sometimes depends on the intended "target" application (market). Some cores are not intended for commercial usage, some interfaces or functions are also to be licensed for commercial use by their legal "inventors" (e.g. CAN, EtherCAT, ...). Free implementations are limited to testing, but using those for commercial desings would not be allowed. For commercial designs there may be also compatibility issues, e.g. writing a functional CAN core based on the published specification is one task, but having this completely tested against the specification to official declare the design "CAN-compliant" is the other side of the medal... But in either case - I think the current policy to provide the free of charge Quartus II webedition and also one version of the NIOS II core for free with options for IP cores (free / evaluation version for test / opencores,..) is (for me) more attractive rather increasing the chip price to "obtain" licenses for function I do not need... Different "bundles" of chip and licenses would result in a non-manageable number of different order codes and honestly, would this differ in the end?
