Xilinx

Xilinx is one of the two big FPGA players, the other being Altera. All tools are proprietary software, like Altera. Lattice is an option that has a FOSS toolchain.

Troubleshooting

Getting ISE 14.7 and Platform Cable USB I and or II to work with Debian 9 / Ubuntu 16.04

In debian 8, platform cable worked out of the box with ISE. It does not work in Debian 9 however, unless you run the following command before starting impact. This command forces use of the open source USB driver for the Platform Cable To recap:

export LD_PRELOAD=/opt/Xilinx/usb-driver/libusb-driver.so
/opt/Xilinx/14.7/ISE_DS/ISE/bin/lin/impact

Note that this requires the USB driver to be installed. There are many guides online on how to manage this.