Verilog and VHDL are the two most popular HDLs, and they are used with FPGAs to design for the configurable portion of the silicon. Vivado Design Suite is a platform for synthesis and analysis of hardware description language (HDL) designs – the FPGA portion of the device. The Unified Installer contains both Vivado and Vitis. The Xilinx Unified Installer for 2020.1 tools is over 35 GB!!! Yikes!
The FPGA fabric connects to the hardcore to allow an infinite number of configuration options. The hard core is a traditional CPU, fixed in the silicon. Additionally, most FPGAs these days contain a “hard core” and configurable logic. Imagine the complexity that goes into compilers – and then imagine configuring asynchronous logic in silicon across millions of configuration settings – and you’ll understand how complex these tools need to be to enable development. With this complexity comes a huge amount of complexity in the toolset.
I think we’re just getting started with understanding how to apply FPGAs to real-world problems. You can literally build hardware accelerators, meet hard real-time deadlines in silicon, make changes to the FPGA logic in the field with OTA updates, and many more applications. If you haven’t used an FPGA-based platform before, it is amazing what you can do with these devices. Xilinx makes a number of great products that we have worked with in the past.