CamperBob2 comments on "Why FPGA manufacturers keep their bitstream formats secret"

By CamperBob2

 "Customers will damage their FPGAs with invalid 
 bitstreams, and blame us for selling unreliable 
 products."

 This used to be true when FPGAs had internal tristate 
 resources (so you could drive the same net from 
 competing sources); this is no longer the case for 
 modern devices. 

I agree that this is a bogus argument — nobody would blame the chip vendor for damaged caused by a third-party bitstream — but I don’t see what it has to do with tristate logic. The only thing keeping me from tying two (or two thousand) CMOS outputs together with an assign statement is the toolchain.

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Read more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10654034

CamperBob2 comments on "Why FPGA manufacturers keep their bitstream formats secret"