The FPGA community is at an exciting juncture in the development of 3rd party CAD tools for FPGA design. Much has been learned in the past decade in the development and use of 3rd party tools such RapidSmith, Torc, and IceStorm. New independent open-source CAD tool projects are emerging which promise to provide alternatives to existing vendor tools. The recent release of the RapidWright tool suggests that Xilinx itself is interested in enabling the user community to develop new use cases and specialized tools for FPGA design. This talk provides a survey of the current landscape, discusses parts of what has been learned over the past decade in the author’s work with 3rd party CAD tool development, and provides some thoughts on the future.

Brent Nelson is department chair and a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Brigham Young University. He received his PhD in computer science in 1984 from the University of Utah in the area of VLSI CAD. His current research interests focus on CAD tools for the design of digital electronic systems (especially FPGA-based systems) and high-performance computing applications using FPGAs and GPGPU devices.