[Fpga-synth] Starting points?

[Magnus Danielson]

> Like all engineering, designing with FPGAs is the art of compromise. 
> It's well encapsulated in the ancient saying: Fast, cheap, good. Pick 
> any two.

There is one thing about modern FPGAs which makes them shine... they are 
to a very, very high degree software upgradeable. Doing remote upgrades 
of almost all of the functionality can be done within minutes these 
days. This has huge benefits in both the development phase as well as 
product lifetime. We can now phase features and even back on design 
paths and choose other ones at a later time. We can still fuck things 
up, but we build experience in avoiding those thing and try to forsee 
such things.

This means that we at certain times may first choose fast product 
release with lower performance, and can then spend our brain cell hours 
on those aspects and features which obviously needs more though or just 
needs more time. There is no longer a stable situation where one can 
make a perfect design. The smaller the design blocks are, the more 
stable they can be, the more complex they get, the higher risk there is 
that they would need amendments, redesigns and adjustments. This is not 
much of a problem, as they also is softer, which allows these things.

Creeping features is part of the buissness, regardless of how much we 
hate them. If we just didn't have any of those pesky customers, then we 
could spend all our efforts of thinking things through properly, make 
the designs more efficient and tidy things up.

Cheers,
Magnus