I can only assume hardware engineers are asking for this kind of tooling, because I can't imagine why companies would be spending the enormous development effort on them and then giving them away for free if they weren't being asked for?
So many things that could be done in a programatic, testable, declarative, scriptable, repeatable way are done with futzy GUI tools in hardware land. Schematic design _could_ be a matter of declaring components, buses, etc. and letting the tool produce something (and then manually manipulate the visual layout if necessary) ; I mean you could literally describe your board using something similar to Verilog and get the tool to produce the schematic for you... we have these kinds of powers in the 21st century -- Instead it's futz with tools that are vaguely Illustrator-esque, find that half your connection points are not actually connected, etc. Why do people want to suffer like this?
Want to use a DRAM controller in Vivado? Find the wizard, enter into 10 text boxes... and if you're lucky you can find the Tcl scripts it generated and in the future just write your Tcl script... but they certainly won't make it easy.
Vivado project in source control? You're going to jump through hoops for that.
So many things that could be done in a programatic, testable, declarative, scriptable, repeatable way are done with futzy GUI tools in hardware land. Schematic design _could_ be a matter of declaring components, buses, etc. and letting the tool produce something (and then manually manipulate the visual layout if necessary) ; I mean you could literally describe your board using something similar to Verilog and get the tool to produce the schematic for you... we have these kinds of powers in the 21st century -- Instead it's futz with tools that are vaguely Illustrator-esque, find that half your connection points are not actually connected, etc. Why do people want to suffer like this?
Want to use a DRAM controller in Vivado? Find the wizard, enter into 10 text boxes... and if you're lucky you can find the Tcl scripts it generated and in the future just write your Tcl script... but they certainly won't make it easy.
Vivado project in source control? You're going to jump through hoops for that.
I want hardware engineers to demand better.