Where I can get HDL Coder and Embedded Coder for Home license?

Actually, I can't find a way how to purchase HDL Coder and Embedded Coder for Home version of Matlab + Simulink package. There are no such options on the on-line shop web page. Help me somebody, please...

Answer 1

[Shantanu Kedar]

Hello,

HDL Coder and Embedded Coder are not available for purchase with MATLAB Home. Please refer the link below to learn more about MATLAB Home

http://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab-home/

Shantanu

[f1y0rdie]

Hello,

It was not obvious nor from that home user's page neither from online shop page that HDL + Embedded coders were not available for home users. Actually, I thought that "coders" were part of main product. Besides, according to these statements bellow there were no such restrictions in home version versus professional version:

https://www.mathworks.com/store/link/faq

"Q. What is the difference between MATLAB Home and the professional version of MATLAB?

A. MATLAB Home provides you with the same power and functionality as the professional version of MATLAB. The difference is that MATLAB Home is only available for personal use, and cannot be used for government, academic, research, commercial, or other organizational purposes."

I have decided to purchase Matlab license only to be able to play with my Xilinx Zynq board after visiting this page https://www.mathworks.com/hardware-support/zynq.html

I very unhappy with this situation... Can anybody tell me how to get my ~500$ back?

[kclamb]

I agree, why is this omitted from home usage?

[Walter Roberson]

https://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab-home/#faq

What is the difference between home software and the professional version of MATLAB?

MATLAB Home offers you the full capabilities of MATLAB. However, certain add-on products are not available for purchase with MATLAB Home.

[Walter Roberson]

The Home license is about $US150 plus the cost of add-ons. I have to wonder how anyone might have reached ~$US500 with add-ons without noticing that the Compiler and Coder and related products were not in the list of available add-ons.

[Samuel Lawrence]

Hi Walter, Are there any future plans to release HDL Coder for home edition? I use it at work, and it would be nice to have for personal projects. With all this experience using MATLAB/simulink to HDL it is hard to go back to coding in verilog.

[Walter Roberson]

Sorry, Samuel, Mathworks does not tell me about those kinds of plans.

[Kevin Nugent]

Sorry, but I am not happy at all too with this matter.

Will like to use Matlab code and convert it to vhdl or verilog code using the hdl coder for Matlab Home use.

Its now 2020 and MathWorks still have not sorted this out for Matlab home users !

Why ??

[Walter Roberson]

I suspect that Mathworks questions whether someone who regularly does VHDL is truly a "home" user that would use the result only around the house and for their own education.

[Walter Roberson]

Jerry Campbell comments to me:

This is a disingenuous response - why cast doubt on other users?

[Walter Roberson]

@Jerry Campbell

I have personally seen at least one post on MATLAB Answers from someone hoping to use a Home HDL Coder license for commercial purposes.

License abuse is a commercial reality, and it does affect corporate decisions.

At the time that Home licenses became available, at the time that the initial decision about whether to include the HDL Coder as a possibility was made, FPGA boards were very expensive, with the exception of some training boards that had extremely limited capacity (about 8 Kb of memory at the time): those were "only" about $US450.

Many FPGA boards are still quite expensive, but the lower end has started filling up and expanding, more boards and higher capacity. At some point, Mathworks will probably decide that there are enough lower-cost boards on the market for it to be reasonable that a low-budget hobbiest might reasonably have use for HDL Coder, and at that point Mathworks might decide to offer it as an option for the Home license.

But that point has not arrived yet.

Answer 2

[Jerry Campbell]

2021 and still now HDL Coder option available for Home Use ?

[Walter Roberson]

Currently (R2021a), HDL Coder is still not available for Home license. I have seen no indication that Mathworks has plans to change that in the foreseeable future, but Mathworks does not talk to me about those plans.

HDL is an expensive technology, with boards often selling for $5000 or more, so I am left with questions about the relative ratio of people who have actual hobby use for HDL, compared to the number of people who would buy Home licenses to avoid paying full rate for what is really commercial usage. I am certain that a company such as Mathworks would be asking itself questions along that line.

[Jerry Campbell]

Walter,

How would you know what Mathworks plans for the future?

Do you work for Mathworks?

Is your answer meant to help you feel better about yourself by casting dishonest intentions on people who ask about the availability of a coder since you can't possibly understand why someone would ask for that capability?

There are a number of open-source VHDL coders becoming available - Surf VHDL is one example. Eventually, the disruption of this market will reach the feature set of Matworks products as well - and then the $5000 premium will not hold.

[Walter Roberson]

Jerry:

The industry term is Non-Disclosure Agreement. I am under several with Mathworks. I am not at liberty to disclose what they cover. Mathworks marketing decisions are, however, not something that I have have access to.

On the other hand, I have been working with MATLAB for over 20 years, quite extensively for the past 15 years. I might not have internal channels to Marketing, but I have been observing what Mathworks does or does not do in marketing, and observing what has been said publicly. I have observed also how users talk about their MATLAB use.

• It is no secret that Mathworks has an ongoing problem with people cracking licenses and making the cracked versions available. I have reported a number of users and sites to Mathworks; I have edited away a number of crack related posts here.
• it is no secret that Mathworks deliberately downgrades Student and Home licences for legal contract reasons. I used to do some government purchasing, including running some Requests For Proposals that were expensive enough that I needed to know NAFTA trade law (but short of the level where we would have had to allow companies worldwide to bid.) It was literally the law that companies had to offer us their most-favored-customer pricing, for equivalent capabilities. It was not permitted for Mathworks to create artificial classes of customers and say that the Student price was $100 but the government price was $5000: if they had then we have been permitted to just pay the advertised Student price even though the contract was for far more. It was, however, considered valid for companies to offer Students (or Home users) discounts on software that had reduced capabilities. So you should expect that Home licences will never be just an inexpensive license class "to be nice": it will always be missing something.
• It is no secret that Mathworks has an ongoing problem with people purchasing the lower-price licenses and using the product for commercial purposes.

Mathworks does not talk to me about how statistics on these problems, or about estimated losses, or about their internal strategies on these matters, or about how they set prices, or how they decide which products to deliberately downgrade or not make available. So hypothetically they might be preparing to merge HDL Coder into basic MATLAB (making it free as part of MATLAB), and I would not know. But I would very much doubt that will happen.

One thing that I can guarantee is that Mathworks does take into account abuse of licenses, people using Home or Student licenses for commercial purposes. What I do not know is how much weight they give that in their decisions.

Will Mathworks eventually make HDL Coder available for the Home license? Perhaps. But absolutely nothing has reached my eyes or ears to suggest that it will be any time soon.

[Jerry Campbell]

Walter,

Perhaps our discussion will highlight this need in the industry. I'd invite other hobbyists interested in FPGAs to join in with their perspectives.

Your position as a government contract officer and knowledge of the FAR (Federal Acquisition Regulation) helps make the point. These pricing differences are in place to justify higher costs to government entities - and consequently the taxpayer.

I did see the note when I purchased my home use license about the restriction of functionality - it doesn't say what is limited. That would be a good addition for those considering the Home use version.

My initial post was about the availability of functionality, HDL coding to hobbyists. It does not mean that anyone who is a hobbyist is trying to obtain a software license illegally.

Mathworks makes a great product. I used it during my graduate studies in 1991 at the Univesity of Virginia. I've come back to using it in the last four years because of my interest in modeling and simulation to support my hobbies because FPGAs are becoming more popular and less expensive.

The following references go back to 2013. Note the reference to hobbyists - or the "relative ratio of people who have actual hobby use for HDL ..."

1. 10 Best FPGA Boards For Engineers And Hobbyists (wonderfulengineering.com)
2. The Hobbyists Guide to FPGAs | Hackaday.io
3. So You Want to Learn FPGAs... - News - SparkFun Electronics
4. https://youtu.be/5qNAJEIqk4Q
5. Please, electronic hobbyists... start using FPGAs!

Second, open-source coding and testing platforms, as well as Microsoft, are supporting VHDL extensions, and they are free to hobbyists:

1. Getting Started with ComBlock FPGA Development Platforms
2. VHDL Testing Platform
3. What is the best software for Verilog/VHDL simulation?
4. VHDL - Visual Studio Marketplace
5. GitHub - TerosTechnology/terosHDL

Finally, the software industry uses several techniques to prevent piracy, including Digital Rights Management (DRM).

The Ultimate Guide For Preventing Software Piracy (2021): Toltec

Perhaps Mathworks can break down that final barrier and bring the coalition of hobbyists on board with their HDL coding and testing capability. Who knows, maybe one of those hobbyists will make a marketable product and then buy a commercial license of MATLAB.

[Walter Roberson]

No, any hobbist who has any idea of possibly someday making a commercial product is not permitted to use a Home license. Home licenses are strictly for personal use for things that will never be sold. Home licenses are not cheap development systems "until business picks up".

For example one person has described using a license at home to create some graphics to entertain their baby.

Someone who built a custom guitar FX device for their own playing enjoyment, perhaps to entertain at family BBQs, and never used it for a paying gig: that would probably be within a Home license.

Model the process of quickly preparing small batches of ice-cream to amaze your kids? Sure.

Model the process of quickly preparing small batches of ice-cream with the intent of supporting a charity drive? Better get permission from Mathworks before starting.

"Some Day" I am going see if I can use MATLAB to program Arduino or Raspberry Pi to run water detection strips I have, to provide an audible alarm when the tub fills up ('cuz everyone chez moi is easily distracted); that will fit under Home license.

[Walter Roberson]

"These pricing differences are in place to justify higher costs to government entities - and consequently the taxpayer."

No, the contract rules exist to prevent corruption and overcharge on supplying contracts to government. Historically there was a huge problem with companies deliberately inflating prices on government contracts, soaking the taxpayers. The procurement rules made that harder: companies could not charge government more than they charged business or consumers for the same product. If Mathworks were, hypothetically, offering $750 hobbist licenses that included all the same products and usage terms as something that they (hypothetically) asked government to pay $7500 for, then that would arguably be a case of overcharging government.

Does Mathworks keep its prices higher than they otherwise be, for the purpose of earning more from the government? I do not know; I cannot rule it out. But back when I was the IT administrator for a government science department, as best I could tell, the Canadian government was not a major customer of MATLAB. Word on the street was that Automotive, and Oil & Gas were much larger markets for MATLAB and Simulink.

I never developed any connections to USA military or spy agencies, or to big name US science projects such as NASA. I never had any information about how much those places use MATLAB; if you were to claim that Mathworks secretly has loads of US government contracts and that they keep their commercial prices high so as to be able to earn skads from USA government agencies, then I would not be able to prove you wrong... since the contracts would be Classified. But again the word has always been Oil&Gas, and Automotive as the largest customers.

[Jerry Campbell]

LOL.

Best to you and your family, Walter.

I can sleep better now that I know you are diligently watching MATLAB usage. If anything is possible, I suspect open-source developers will make alternative products that fill this gap.

[Xymbu]

The lack of the availabilty of the Compiler and Coder for home licenses is why I have been slowly relying less and less on matlab. I use my home license for fun projects around my house and in doing so I learn a lot of possible use cases. This translates to my thought process at work where we have all the commercial licenses, but time to learn something mattersso if you have an idea and you already know how to do it with python because thats where you learned the skill since it wasn't avaliable to the learning community at home, i'm gonna use python at work and those expensive licenses from mathworks will soon be viewed as unnecessary. CREO understands this issue that's why they offer a full version of CREO for educational scenarios. Because if that's what they had access to to learn on, that's what they'll request at a job.