> Another big step would be building a reasonable toolchain around it that does not consist of big clunky proprietary tools with onerous licensing.
While I think a toolchain other than Xilinx or Altera is out of the question due to technical complexity, Quartus Web Edition is free and supports the low-cost Cyclone devices including the ones with ARM cores (SoC): (pdf) http://www.altera.com/literature/po/ss_quartussevswe.pdf. I imagine Xilinx has something similar.
> And finally, there's a bootstrapping problem. FPGAs aren't really a mass-market platform, because no one has them (unless they're developing custom hardware).
Yes, that's the chicken/egg problem that both Xilinx and Altera are addressing by putting ARM cores on their devices that run just fine without any FPGA configuration at all. It's an appeal to software developers while pitching the FPGA hardware as a super-special add-on feature really cool to have for ... something.
Altera has just started shipping the first SoC devices I think, about 6 months or so behind Xilinx. Now we'll see if the strategy works...
While I think a toolchain other than Xilinx or Altera is out of the question due to technical complexity, Quartus Web Edition is free and supports the low-cost Cyclone devices including the ones with ARM cores (SoC): (pdf) http://www.altera.com/literature/po/ss_quartussevswe.pdf. I imagine Xilinx has something similar.
> And finally, there's a bootstrapping problem. FPGAs aren't really a mass-market platform, because no one has them (unless they're developing custom hardware).
Yes, that's the chicken/egg problem that both Xilinx and Altera are addressing by putting ARM cores on their devices that run just fine without any FPGA configuration at all. It's an appeal to software developers while pitching the FPGA hardware as a super-special add-on feature really cool to have for ... something.
Altera has just started shipping the first SoC devices I think, about 6 months or so behind Xilinx. Now we'll see if the strategy works...