Why FPGA manufacturers keep their bitstream formats secret
So, who will set up a transparent FPGA manufacturing company with old tech that will then prove all these companies wrong by capturing the market?<p>FPGA manufacturers keep their bitstreams secret because there is no real demand for openness. The customers are happy with the product, they are <i>applying</i> the chips and they work. Outside of the tinkerer world there exists a vast realm of industry where access to the bitstream format would be a nice-to-have but not a must. If it were then a manufacturer would surely take the lead in this and capture the marketshare of the others.<p>For tinkerers and open source proponents this is of course a less-than-ideal situation, we&#x27;d like to see that bitstream documented because then we can make tools operate on them and that generate them. But for the vast majority of the customers (some exceptions do exist) this is not a big issue.<p>The most heard complaint is that the toolchains are cumbersome, slow and too large, not that the bitstreams aren&#x27;t open (funny though: those toolchains would be fixable <i>if</i> the bistreams were open...).