Free Tools?

Let's be honest, the status of the closed source FPGA vendor tools is pretty abyssmal. I've had more experience with Vivado than Quartus, but I hear bad things from that side as well. At some point Xilinx even disabled bug reports unless you were a "tier 1" customer - they didn't even want to get our bug reports because we were small fry. When I was doing FPGA development with Vivado it seemed like much of our effort was spent working around bugs.

I had hopes that maybe when Intel bought Altera they'd pour more resources into the FPGA tools. Not sure if that's happened or not. I tried to use the Quartus OpenCL (free download) tool from Intel/Altera a couple of months back and gave up because of some licensing issue I kept running into (I was working from a tutorial where the first step was "Download the free OpenCL tool"). Life's too short to chase a licensing bug for a "free" tool.

Actual free open source tools like Yosys allow users to look into the source code if need be. Or to submit issues to the developers on github. A lot of us have dreamed of a fully open source synthesis tool that could get us from HDL->bitstream for years and now it seems to have arrived (at least for some Xilinx 7 parts and Lattice ICE40). The other day I got my BlackIce II board (fully open source board) with a Lattice ICE40 FPGA and used Yosys to get a fully open RISCV core running on it. It worked. I was elated. No closed source software involved - this is an amazing era we're entering.

I really wonder what Intel/Altera gains from keeping their tools licensed (as in there's a license manager)? Selling Quartus licenses is a tiny drop in Intel's revenue stream - why bother? I'd argue that making all the Altera dev tools completely free (free from licensing, not necessarily even open source) would be a good move for them. Ultimately they're trying to sell chips. And since they're trying to make it a lot easier for software developers to target FPGAs seamlessly they should make those tools license-free as well (OpenCL synth) in order to get as many developers on board as possible.

Even if Quartus itself isn't ever open sourced, perhaps Intel/Altera could open up the specs for the bitstream formats so that an open source ecosystem of tools could bloom around Altera FPGAs? This would benefit everyone including Intel/Altera.