Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) have long been the primary tool for software engineers. Like an airplane cockpit, an IDE is the control center from which the engineer accesses all of the data and tools that he needs. IDEs, and especially Eclipse, have proven to be extensible, open, high quality platforms.

However, until now, IDEs have not been popular in hardware development circles. This is partly because many of the available IDEs for hardware development have not lived up to the potential of IDEs that is typical in the software world. Instead, IDEs tend to be overly complex, closed, and they lock the customer in.

Today, though, Eclipse is finally gaining traction among EDA[] (electronic design automation) and FPGA[] companies. One such EDA company, Sigasi, has just released the first commercial VHDL plugin for Eclipse. Now, at last, hardware design teams can use Eclipse as a basis for their own customized IDEs, based on the commercial and open-source plugins that they need in their central cockpit for hardware design.