I'm curious as to what the general attitude of the community towards various Simulink/FPGA
DSP tools is.

I am aware of four different existing tools for converting Matlab Simulink models to FPGA
code:

Xilinx System Generator
Altera DSPbuilder
Synplicity's SynDSP
Simulink's variant (Name escpaes me)

I am a heavy user of Xilinx System Generator, and think it significantly cuts development time
on even all logic (non-DSP) based designs.  In fact, I cringe at the thought of ever
hand-writing VHDL for any reason, after the ease of development in XSG.  

I have played with SynDSP and found it to be strong in features I don't necessarily need, and
lacking in ones I am used to.

My limited experience with DSPbuilder was not very encouraging.

Any other experiences, positive or negative?

Eyal Cohen

I am a heavy user of Xilinx system generator too. So far I found it very useful in
developing DSP intensive applications such as wireless baseband modems. In fact, recently I
came across another method of developing DSP systems for FPGA using simulink which is exceldsp.
It helps in converting Simulink floating point models into fixed point model and then use
system generator for building the fixed point model for target FPGA. 
I found one interesting article for Chris Dick about building synchronizer for QAM using these
tools in 30 min!! 
I'm curious as to what the general attitude of the community towards various Simulink/FPGA DSP
tools is.
>
>I am aware of four different existing tools for converting Matlab Simulink models to FPGA
code:
>
>Xilinx System Generator
>Altera DSPbuilder
>Synplicity's SynDSP
>Simulink's variant (Name escpaes me)
>
>I am a heavy user of Xilinx System Generator, and think it significantly cuts development
time on even all logic (non-DSP) based designs.  In fact, I cringe at the thought of ever
hand-writing VHDL for any reason, after the ease of development in XSG.  
>
>I have played with SynDSP and found it to be strong in features I don't necessarily need,
and lacking in ones I am used to.
>
>My limited experience with DSPbuilder was not very encouraging.
>
>Any other experiences, positive or negative?
>
>Eyal Cohen