If you want to start programming right away on your recently bought FPGA devkit or in some cheap recycled board, you will probably get astonished to realize that you need to download about ~15GB of bloatware just to get started and build the simple blinky example, although that logic synthesis and technology mappings are difficult problems they don't require that amount of complexity shifted to the tooling environment setup nor rest it on the newcomer hobbyist/engineer shoulders.
When you decide to learn programming digital circuits at first you bump into a big wall, the learning curve is steep and a part of this is the difficulty in creating an environment with the necessary tools to get started.ĭespite the efforts of the open source community to support development for the major FPGA vendors, there are not a mature project yet with support for Xilinx FPGAs, that kind of work require a huge amount of reverse engineering effort, luckily there are projects working in this direction like Project X-Ray.
