[Cryptech Tech] Alpha board strategy

[Павел Шатов]

On 19.02.2015 21:17, Warren Kumari wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 2:42 AM, Joachim Strömbergson
> <joachim at secworks.se> wrote:
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>> Aloha!
>>
>> Шатов Павел wrote:
>>>> And just to make it easier for others to replicate what we do in
>>>> order to build trust or try to contribute the tool becomes a
>>>> problem if the cost serious dough.
>>> Both ISE and Quartus are $2,995.
>> Depends if you go node locked or not. Node locked Quartus is 1995 USD
>> and floating is 3995 USD. And that is fairly serious dough if you are
>> not planning to do a single board or so.

I can't find $1995 on their website, node-locked Quartus should be 
$2995, exactly(!) the same price as node-locked ISE.
http://www.altera.com/buy/software/buy-software.html
http://www.xilinx.com/products/design-tools/ise-design-suite.html

>>
>>> I mean that if we choose Altera's devices, we can develop Alpha Board
>>> in such a way, that it will accept both A7 (largest device that is
>>> available with free license) and A9 (largest available device). End
>>> users can decide on their own what chip to solder.
> So, how far can a floating license float? I find their licensing
> information page unhelpful and was not able to find much detail, but I
> *think* we could buy the primary verilog developers their own licenses
> and then one or two floating seats, setup a license server and have
> people who actually need to use a floating license VPN into a network
> with the FLEXlm license server.
> I don't know how many people would need to use the software *at the
> same time*, but this might allow people who need to build on e.g A9
> but do not have their own software to do so.
>
I have yet another idea. Both Altera and Xilinx offer 30-day evaluation 
versions of their software. I haven't figured out yet whether they are 
limited in some way or not. If someone only needs to compile our project 
for a larger device, then even these evaluation versions might be enough.