FPGA design made easy — need feedback

Hello all,

'boldport flow' is a web-based tool that allows developers to easily generate a build environment for FPGA projects. At present, it's a Makefile generator with a web-based front end (now supporting Xilinx, FPGAs, and Linux) while in the future it'll do a whole lot more. Give it a look:

http://www.boldport.com

The "theory" behind the structure boldport uses is defined here:

http://www.boldport.com/docs/fpgaproj

which may be useful even if you don't use the tool itself.

We're seeking early adopters and honest feedback (that is, good and bad), which go a long way at this early stage. Is it useful to you? Why or why not? Which features would you like see added? And so on. We're also happy to work with projects in order for them to use the 'boldport flow', and allow us to improve the tool. Please get in touch and spread the word.

Looks good, considering it's a very early release, and I assume it's for hobby projects, because I don't see any serious project going to an online flow.

I am impressed with boldport, even if I find it useful mainly because of the docs page.

Congratulations on what you did, great work!

Hi Dorin,

Thanks for the kind words; I'm glad you find it useful and interesting.

> I assume it’s for hobby projects, because I don’t see any serious project going to an online flow.

It isn't quite an "online flow" in that it generates the build framework for you, but you run the tools on your own machine. Later, you'll be able to upload your results for analysis and automatically farm out jobs to a cloud service. Admittedly, as it stands, small projects seem to be best suited, though the ideas and method could be equally applied to large projects, which is the long term plan. I've written about why scripted flows make sense for every kind of user: https://www.boldport.com/blog/?p=369

Do you have a project 'boldport flow' can be useful for? I'd be interested in hearing how, or why not, and generally about the problems you're facing that can be helped through boldport.

> I am impressed with boldport, even if I find it useful mainly because of the docs page.

A lot of thought went into the process and underlying engine. Please feel free to participate in the discussion on the blog.

Do you plan to support other FPGA vendors like Altera and Lattice?

We do plan to, yes. Progress depends on demand and how development resources are allocated, though. I can't quite commit when support will be complete at the moment, but the idea is that you'll be able to use the same process to compile designs for multiple vendors.

I might try it out in the future and will try to keep up with it on the blog and on the flow side. So far we use a scripted flow in the company I work for, but it's not 100% standardized... pretty much anyone can use his own version, and sometimes if you have to take over from someone else on a project or simply help somebody else you have to learn his way of doing things too.

I like the flexibility of this way, to choose what's best for you, which in a sense I found in boldport (by allowing personalized directory structures for once) but I liked more the unity of a single well thought flow you created.

Again great job, I hope to be useful to you and maybe find boldport useful for me in the future.