Xilinx ISE drops support for more parts

[Steve Lass]

Jim Granville wrote:

Can we get a quick summary of what's removed, and what
legacy versions of SW are needed to support which family ?


The current software (version 5.1i, 5.2i, 6.1i) supports Virtex,

Virtex-E, Virtex-II, Virtex-II Pro, Spartan II, Spartan IIE, and Spartan-3.
ISE Classics (version 4.2i) supports XC4000E, XC4000L, XC4000EX,
XC4000XL, XC4000XLA, Spartan, and SpartanXL.

Contact the hotline if you need software for:
3.1i supporting XC3000A, XC3000L and XC5200.
XACT 6 supporting XC2000, XC3000, and XC4000, XC4000A and XC5200.

Steve

 

[Uwe Bonnes]

Marius Vollmer <mvo@zagadka.de> wrote:
: Peter Alfke <peter@xilinx.com> writes:

:> Old software is available for free, but may require an old computer
:> OS.

: What about releasing the source of unsupported tools into the public
: domain, or as Free Software? Unmaintained binary only software is not
: a big help, but old source code that one can maintain oneself is a
: winner.

: You might also learn a thing or two about the 'Free Software / Open
: Source community' that way and how it might help you make Xilinx more
: popular.

To cite the Bible:

"Eher geht ein Kamel durch's Nadeloehr, als dass ..."

Probably the software is hopelessly interweaved with externelly licensed
software and other parts that are still considered crucial. I doubt that
there is a big difference between an FPGA suite and Netscape. And look what
effort it took to get from Netscape to Mozilla. The audience for a FPGA
suite is oders of magnitude smaller.

Anyways, such a move would be great...

Bye

B.t.w.: For mantaining legacy version of windows software, the windows
emulator wine (www.winehq.com) might be an option for the
not-so-faint-hearted.

--
Uwe Bonnes bon@elektron.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de

Institut fuer Kernphysik Schlossgartenstrasse 9 64289 Darmstadt
--------- Tel. 06151 162516 -------- Fax. 06151 164321 ----------

 

[B. Joshua Rosen]

On Tue, 01 Jul 2003 05:47:25 -0700, lecroy wrote:

I am reposting after a memo from reader siting problems using the Xilinx
link to post to this group. Sorry about any problems this may have
caused.

After the release of Alliance 3 support was no longer offered for the
XC3xxx family. Worse, if you did not happen to have the original
software that supported these devices, Xilinx would not sell you a copy.
Even today we still have product that uses the 3xxx family.

I am looking at upgrading our group to Allience 5.x and again see that
Xilinx has dropped all support for Spartan. Other families were dropped
as well. We would now need three copies of software running to support
the Xilinx devices we use. Of course, not all the Xilinx tools like to
be co-installed, so it's multiple computers or swap installs.

Xilinx, what is your problem? Altera may drop parts, but their router
continues to support all of their devices. Is your software so poorly
written that it is so difficult to maintain parts that you need to drop
them? I could understand if the parts were no longer available, or you
at least sold older copies of your software.

If you are going to continue to use parts long after they are obsolete
then you should archive the tools that you used to do the original design.
It's hardly realistic to expect todays tools to support parts that have
been obsolete for 10 years. Periodically some major component of the tools
gets completely rewritten, when that happens it's hard enough for them to
put in support for all of the current parts let alone add support for all
of the old parts.

 

[B. Joshua Rosen]

On Fri, 04 Jul 2003 08:48:04 +0200, Thomas Heller wrote:

Steve Lass <lass@xilinx.com> writes:

Jim Granville wrote:

Can we get a quick summary of what's removed, and what legacy versions
of SW are needed to support which family ?

The current software (version 5.1i, 5.2i, 6.1i) supports Virtex,
Virtex-E, Virtex-II, Virtex-II Pro, Spartan II, Spartan IIE, and
Spartan-3.
ISE Classics (version 4.2i) supports XC4000E, XC4000L, XC4000EX,
XC4000XL, XC4000XLA, Spartan, and SpartanXL.

Contact the hotline if you need software for: 3.1i supporting XC3000A,
XC3000L and XC5200. XACT 6 supporting XC2000, XC3000, and XC4000,
XC4000A and XC5200.

This sounds like I better terminate my Xilinx software subscription, and
use the free versions instead.

I recently changed my PC to a new one, and tried to install the licensed
version of ISE 4.2, because I need Spartan and Spartan XL. It was a pain
to make it work again because one design uses FPGA express, and it always
complained about the license being invalid.

The only solution was, as a Xilinx FAE told me, to use use tool to change
the volume serial number of my hard disk to the one that the old PC had.
Fortunately I didn' have to reregister Windows XP again.

Thomas

You complaint is with Synopsys not Xilinx, the Xilinx tools don't have any
hardware enforced licensing.

 

[B. Joshua Rosen]

On Thu, 03 Jul 2003 09:23:08 -0700, lecroy wrote:

I'm not saying that you should or shouldn't use the Spartan chips. But
I am curious as to why you would use such an old technology. Certainly
there are cheaper, faster, bigger chips available.

In our case, the designs are done. In are market we are not that
sensitive to part costs. The real cost is qualifying a new design just
to phase out a part the is still being sold. New designs, no problem.

In extremely long product life markets you have to warehouse everything.
Any board that is old enough to have a 3000 on it is full of components
that haven't been manufactured for years. Chances are you have parts that
were made by companies that aren't even in business anymore. The only way
that you can continue to make those boards is to have stockpiles of parts.
If you are stockpiling parts then you can stockpile software and a couple
of old computers to run it on. Keeping and a couple of old Sparc 1s or 386
PCs in the corner is far cheaper then stockpiling components.

One more thing, you said the reason for continuing to build outdated
systems is the cost of qualifying a new design. Well the same goes for
tools, you don't want to have to qualify a new tool set on the old parts
just so you can do a bug fix. You know that the old tools worked, you
don't know what bugs would pop up in the new tools if you tried to use
them for a really outdated part.

 

[B. Joshua Rosen]

On Thu, 03 Jul 2003 22:10:58 +0000, Uwe Bonnes wrote:

B.t.w.: For maintaining legacy version of windows software, the windows
emulator wine (www.winehq.com) might be an option for the
not-so-faint-hearted.

Uwe is right about this. I can say from personal experience that Wine will
run all of the versions of the Xilinx tools going back to the 3.x
releases. Chances are that it will handle earlier releases also, it can
probably even support the XACT tools which ran on Windows 3.1 as I
remember. You could also use Win4Lin which runs any Win9x on top of Linux.
Version 2.x was contemporary with Win95 so you certainly could use
Win95/98 on Win4Lin to run them.

 

[Thomas Heller]

rickman <spamgoeshere4@yahoo.com> writes:

Thomas Heller wrote:

Steve Lass <lass@xilinx.com> writes:

Jim Granville wrote:

Can we get a quick summary of what's removed, and what legacy
versions of SW are needed to support which family ?

The current software (version 5.1i, 5.2i, 6.1i) supports Virtex,
Virtex-E, Virtex-II, Virtex-II Pro, Spartan II, Spartan IIE, and
Spartan-3.
ISE Classics (version 4.2i) supports XC4000E, XC4000L, XC4000EX,
XC4000XL, XC4000XLA, Spartan, and SpartanXL.

Contact the hotline if you need software for:
3.1i supporting XC3000A, XC3000L and XC5200.
XACT 6 supporting XC2000, XC3000, and XC4000, XC4000A and XC5200.

This sounds like I better terminate my Xilinx software subscription, and
use the free versions instead.

I recently changed my PC to a new one, and tried to install the licensed
version of ISE 4.2, because I need Spartan and Spartan XL. It was a
pain to make it work again because one design uses FPGA express, and it
always complained about the license being invalid.

The only solution was, as a Xilinx FAE told me, to use use tool to
change the volume serial number of my hard disk to the one that the old
PC had. Fortunately I didn' have to reregister Windows XP again.

Which tool did you find that would let you change the disk serial
number?

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/source/misc.shtml#VolumeId

 

[lecroy]

I think we covered the archive a while back.

It's hardly realistic to expect todays tools to support parts that have
been obsolete for 10 years.

Again, we are talking Spartan which has not been obsolete for ten
years.

Periodically some major component of the tools
gets completely rewritten, when that happens it's hard enough for them to
put in support for all of the current parts let alone add support for all
of the old parts.

Altera just keeps adding more support for their older devices to
Quartus. It's their newest tool. Maybe they have more time on their
hands.

 

[lecroy]

In extremely long product life markets you have to warehouse everything.
Any board that is old enough to have a 3000 on it is full of components
that haven't been manufactured for years. Chances are you have parts that
were made by companies that aren't even in business anymore. The only way
that you can continue to make those boards is to have stockpiles of parts.
If you are stockpiling parts then you can stockpile software and a couple
of old computers to run it on. Keeping and a couple of old Sparc 1s or 386
PCs in the corner is far cheaper then stockpiling components.

Actually, we are able to still procure all of the components for that
board. All of the companies are still in business. I'm not even sure
why you are making these remarks as you don't work for us. Again, we
do end up keeping old PCs around and our older copies of the software
if they were used to create a design. I would need to do this even if
our friends at Xilinx stopped dropping support for parts every few
years.

One more thing, you said the reason for continuing to build outdated
systems is the cost of qualifying a new design. Well the same goes for
tools, you don't want to have to qualify a new tool set on the old parts
just so you can do a bug fix. You know that the old tools worked, you
don't know what bugs would pop up in the new tools if you tried to use
them for a really outdated part.

I have to qualify each new tool as they become available. You are
right, it takes a lot of time which prevents me from releasing every
new update for our own internal use. If the Xilinx did not remove
support for devices as the tools advance I would qualify them for
older designs. Again, to allow us to leverage a standard user
interface, etc.

 

[B. Joshua Rosen]

On Tue, 08 Jul 2003 12:55:42 -0700, lecroy wrote:

I made this statement because one of my clients is in a marketplace
(military and medical) where they ship systems for years and years
because the customers don't care about the costs they just don't want
to rewrite or requalify software.

That's your client, not us.

You don't seem to understand that Xilinx isn't removing support for the
old devices, they aren't adding support for those devices to new tools.

ISE is not a new tool, just a new release with no support for Spartan.

ISE is just the GUI front end for the tools, it's not the important part
of the Xilinx tool suite. The key elements are the mapper (map), the place
and router (par), and the timing analyzer (trce). Xilinx is also now doing
a synthesis tool of their own (XST) which is one more piece of the puzzle
that has to be supported for each device. I was told by Xilinx that map
was rewritten for the 5.x release. The 6.x release is going to be 64 bit
as well as supporting native Linux, so that means that every important
piece of the tool chain is subject to major changes. Which means in turn
that the tool set has to be QAed on every part that it supports. The more
parts that they have to support the harder the QA job is.

Periodically Xilinx completely rewrites some component. They do this
because the requirements change for each new generation.

Are you talking for Xilinx now? Are they also a client of yours?

I'm not talking for Xilinx, but I do talk to them all the time. With any
complex piece of software, not just Xilinx's, you have to make choices
when you go forward that requires you to lose some features that you had
in the past in order to improve support for the things that you need to do
in the future. To give you an example from a field completely unrelated to
this one, last week Adobe announced a new version of their video editing
software, Premiere. As of this release they are no longer supporting Macs,
just XP. Premiere was originally written for the Mac and for years was a
Mac only product but now the number of Mac users is to small for Adobe to
bother doing a Mac port. When they did a radical rewrite they choose that
moment to drop Mac support. The same thing goes for Xilinx and Spartans.
No one is doing new designs with the original Spartan family, so it's not
worth Xilinx spending any money putting in support for Spartans in their
new tool sets. The old tools are completely adequate for doing anything
that you need to do with a Spartan. Just because there is a new better
faster tool set available doesn't mean that the old stuff has suddenly
vanished from the face of the earth. Disk space is cheap, you can have as
many versions of the tools as you want on a system, all you have to do to
switch between one rev and another is change an environment variable.

part. If you were to add support for old parts into the new tools you
would expect that the new tools to be riddled with bugs for that part
for the simple reason that nobody is using that tool set on that part,
and therefore nobody is finding the bugs.

I expect Xilinx to maintain a certain level of quality in their
software, and I would not expect the tools to be riddled with bugs,
ever!

All software has bugs and x.0 software has lots of bugs. Xilinx is
actually better than most but whenever they add a new family or do a major
rewrite there are bugs. I did an Altera Stratix design last year and every
piece of software in their design chain was broken, starting with the
Verilog models which wouldn't even compile. I've never had that level of
problems with Xilinx but I've certainly encountered my share of bugs in
their stuff over the years.

Anyone who uses a brand new part
knows how buggy the tools can be for the first six months or so. Now
imagine that you are the only person in the world that was using that
part, the bugs would never get fixed.

And the part would never be made.

My point is that the support for an old part in a new tool wouldn't be any
better than the initial beta release of a new part. The difference being
is that with a new part lots of people are using it so that the software
bugs get found and fixed. With the obsolete part there will be hardly
anyone using it so the bugs aren't going to get found, the fixes aren't
going to get made, and the software quality will be beta forever. With the
tool set that existed at the end of the parts mainstream life the software
was mature. You benefit from the years of cumulative bug fixes that had been
applied, that's the stuff you want to be using if you have to make a
change to an old part.

Again, I have not seen the case you are describing with Altera's router.
Try to be more data driven with your comments.

As I said before my experience with Altera has been much worse then with
Xilinx. The kind of bugs that I encountered with the Altera tool set
indicated that they hadn't done any QA at all. In all fairness I was doing
a Stratix design which was a beta part at the time so you would expect all
sorts of problems.

 

[lecroy]

ISE is just the GUI front end for the tools, it's not the important part
of the Xilinx tool suite.

As you may have read in one of my prior posts, we use the Alliance
tool set. Preaching about what the tools are is no value to me. We
have been using them for years. So this is no value.

was rewritten for the 5.x release. The 6.x release is going to be 64 bit
as well as supporting native Linux, so that means that every important

I would rather them stay focused on making a better product under MS
than remove resources to work on LINUX and possibly add more problems
for themselves. Just my preference. I guess all the major tool people
are porting their code anyway so we will see. Nothing to do with the
original posting, but fun to talk about.

I'm not talking for Xilinx, but I do talk to them all the time.

I'm sure most of us do.

moment to drop Mac support. The same thing goes for Xilinx and Spartans.
No one is doing new designs with the original Spartan family, so it's not
worth Xilinx spending any money putting in support for Spartans in their
new tool sets.

If the code were structured, supporting the older devices would not be
a problem.

The old tools are completely adequate for doing anything
that you need to do with a Spartan.

Agree, but again, they drive different and have their own bugs that
you need to remember.

Just because there is a new better
faster tool set available doesn't mean that the old stuff has suddenly
vanished from the face of the earth.

No value.

Disk space is cheap, you can have as
many versions of the tools as you want on a system, all you have to do to
switch between one rev and another is change an environment variable.

Again, does not help the original problem.

All software has bugs and x.0 software has lots of bugs.

Disagree.

Xilinx is
actually better than most but whenever they add a new family or do a major
rewrite there are bugs. I did an Altera Stratix design last year and every
piece of software in their design chain was broken, starting with the
Verilog models which wouldn't even compile. I've never had that level of
problems with Xilinx but I've certainly encountered my share of bugs in
their stuff over the years.

Have used Altera for seven years or so and have had good results.

My point is that the support for an old part in a new tool wouldn't be any
better than the initial beta release of a new part.

If they don't address known bugs that would be the case.

The difference being
is that with a new part lots of people are using it so that the software
bugs get found and fixed. With the obsolete part there will be hardly
anyone using it so the bugs aren't going to get found, the fixes aren't
going to get made, and the software quality will be beta forever.

No value.

With the
tool set that existed at the end of the parts mainstream life the software
was mature. You benefit from the years of cumulative bug fixes that had been
applied, that's the stuff you want to be using if you have to make a
change to an old part.

Thanks to Xilinx, this is the way you have to operate. So again, your
not saying anything of value.

As I said before my experience with Altera has been much worse then with
Xilinx.

I would have to say my experience has been a wash between the two.

The kind of bugs that I encountered with the Altera tool set
indicated that they hadn't done any QA at all.

Sounds like some of the problems I find with Xilinx. Even you yourself
just posted about all the bugs you seem to find in the Xilinx tools.
It's bad when they know the bugs are there and don't have the
resources to address them on a major release.