undefined | Better HN

0 pointstails4e5y ago0 comments

Vivado is amazing compared with the ASIC counterparts: Design compiler is for RTL synthesis only and you need years of experience to get any decent qor out of it. In ASIC land you have separate tools for every step, synthesis, STAs, PnR, simulation, floor planning, power analysis, etc. Vivado does all that in one seamless tool, and allows you to cross probe from a routed net right back to the RTL code it came from. Try doing that with ASIC tools. So to me it's a matter of perspective, once you understand how difficult the problem of hardware design is to solve, and what some of the existing de facto industry standard tools are like (for ASIC), you come to appreciate vivado for just how well it brings all of these complex facets together. Of course if you come from a SW background you make think vivado is terrible compared to VScode or some other IDE, but that's an unfair comparison. I guess to reframe the question - show me a hardware design environment that is better than Vivado. Also, I separate vivado fron the Xilixn SDK, as they are different tools, and Vivado is expclitly got the HW parts of the design

0 comments

jlokier5y ago

I added one small Verilog file to a Vivado project.

It froze the IDE for 45 minutes before I could do anything else.

This was on a beefy machine at AWS too, not some cheap home desktop thing.

That wasn't compiling, no synthesis, P&R, nothing.

There was no giant netlist I'd been working on either. Most of the FPGA was empty.

That was literally just adding a small source file which the IDE auto-indexed so you could browse the contents.

In Verilator, an open source Verilog simulator, that same source file loaded, completed its simulation and checked test results in less than a second. So it wasn't that hard to compile and expand its contents.

Vivado is excellent for some things. But the excellence is not uniform unfortunately. On that project, I had to do most of the Verilog development outside Vivado because it was vastly faster outside Only importing modules when they were pretty much ready to use and behaviorally validated.

tails4eOP5y ago

That's definitely an anomaly, I use vivado with ASIC code reguarly, very large designs and have not seen anything like this. I use vivado to elaborate and a analyse code intended for ASIC use as its better than other ASIC tools for that purpose. Once I'm happy with it in vivado, then I push it through design compiler, etc. Elaborating a deign that is 4 hours in DC synthesis is about 3 mins in vivado elaboration.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse