The FPGA nobody can rebuild
If I sent you this, you probably have a bitstream in the field that hasn't been rebuilt in years. The build lives on one old machine with the right ISE or Quartus version, the licence is on a dongle, and the engineer who wrote it has left. It works, so nobody touches it, until the part goes end of life or a customer asks for one change.
I've written HDL for a living and I've inherited other people's. At Netline I built the FPGA signal generator at the centre of a counter-IED system fielded with NATO forces, and I've spent a lot of the years since living with decisions buried in a fabric nobody documented.
What usually hurts
- The build exists on one machine. One dead disk and you can't ship a fix.
- The part is end of life and nothing modern is pin or fabric compatible.
- Nobody knows why the constraints are what they are, so every change is a gamble on timing.
- There's no testbench, so every change has to be proven on the bench, slowly.
How I'd fix it
- Make it buildable again, by anyone, and prove the rebuilt bitstream matches the one in the field.
- Capture what the real system does on the bench and turn it into a simulation testbench. That's the contract for everything after.
- Pick the target honestly: a current part and toolchain, some logic moved into a processor, or keep it and do a last-time buy. It depends on your volumes and product lifetime.
- Port block by block. AI does most of the reading and translating, simulation and hardware decide what's right.
The part I'd actually sell you on
I do the work with an AI setup built around your design, and when I leave, it stays. Your engineers can ask it what a block does or why a constraint has that value, trace a failing capture back through the fabric, or try a change and have simulation check it against the captured vectors.
It lives in your repo, runs on a model you pick (on your own servers if the code can't leave the building), and there's no per-seat fee. The next HDL hire gets up to speed in weeks, not a quarter.
How we'd start
Half a day with whoever still knows the design, no charge. After that I can tell you what it would take, or that your last-time buy covers you for another eight years. If we go ahead, I work inside your team one or two days a week.
Send me a line on what the design does, roughly when it was written and which part it's on. That's usually enough to know if it's worth a call.
ilan@aardvark-sensing.com · LinkedIn
Ilan