VHDL soft-core portability to Xilinx, Altera, Atmel....

Allright,
My question is not about choosing Xilinx or Altera. From what I have
read online, it seems that the choice mostly depends on personal
experiences with the respective companies.

My question deals with soft-cores. If I write a soft-core in VHDL, is
it possible to implement it on a Xilinx, Altera, Actel or other FPGA
brands using their respective synthesizer software?
To me VHDL is VHDL, so I do not understand why soft-cores written in
VHDL like Picoblaze,Microblaze would be FPGA company specific?

What is the basic architectural differences of FPGAs which would
prevent implementaion of soft-core (maybe like Microblaze) on Altera
FPGAs? Is comparing Xilinx FPGAs and Altera FPGAs really like comparing
apples and oranges? And then what about the newer FPGAs from
Atmel(FPSLIC) or Actel etc.

Are there any publication which benchmark the different FPGAs and their
technologies?

Is there a way to design soft-cores in VHDL so that they can be
implemented on any reconfigurable platforms, like Xilinx FPGA, Atmel
FPGA(FPSLIC) or Alterra FPGAs?

At this stage I just experimenting with different soft-cores for my
thesis project, and I am just curious about all the excitement caused
by the marketing blitz caused by newer FPGA products like FPSLIC, or
Actel's FPGA etc.
My perspective on this topic is educational and research based, so I
would appreciate any help in that context.

Thanks in advance for all your suggestions.

-Yaju N
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Brigham Young University, Provo UT
y a j u a t b y u . edu

.

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