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The best business move they could make against the competition giants, is to ask people like Dave Shah and Clifford Wolfe to just organize a single team under a

The best business move they could make against the competition giants, is to ask people like Dave Shah and Clifford Wolfe to just organize a single team under a foundation umbrella and then make a large annual donation, plus technical support/documentation where needed. If Lattice disrupts the market as de facto enablers of an LLVM of sorts for FPGA's they will make a lot of clients think twice for their next projects. It doesn't matter how much IP secret sauce Xilinx or Altera have in their fabric, every single team out there hates the locked in toolchain and is slowed down by it in a non-negligible way. In my opinion this is the type of bold move that could flip the market share upside down in favour of Lattice.

UncleOxidant 6y ago
The FPGA companies need help with software because quite frankly, their software sucks - so damn buggy. And yet, here they could get some significant help for not much $$. But Xilinx and Altera prefer having customers locked in. I've long thought that the best way for the smaller players to gain marketshare is for them to actively court open source - not only to allow it, but to encourage and fund it.
sam_bristow 6y ago
FYI it's Claire Wolfe now.
- DoingIsLearning 6y ago
  Thank you for the correction. The time window I was allowed to edit the comment has passed, perhaps Dang can fix the original comment but otherwise noted.
tn1 6y ago
> It doesn't matter how much IP secret sauce Xilinx or Altera have in their fabric, every single team out there hates the locked in toolchain and is slowed down by it in a non-negligible way. Unfortunately this isn't really a compelling reason to switch for most shops. The choice of FPGA is entirely driven by the features of the parts that the vendor offers. Salespeople talk to the relevant engineers and a part + pricing is negotiated accordingly. Once you start pushing the limits of what your part can do, your design necessarily becomes tied to the details of the chip. The secret sauce is the reason why a specific part is bought! At least Vivado (on Linux) is actually quite painless once you get the hang of it. If you're an important enough customer, you can complain to your FAE and they'll get you access to unreleased versions with a specific problem fixed.
- DoingIsLearning 6y ago
  I have to agree with the comment from bsder, unless you are doing heavy-duty video, RADAR, or RF comms the large majority of chips are never fully utilized, these business are really quite dependent on sales pitches/push. For the large majority of clients they just need to implement a small/medium time critical task. > At least Vivado (on Linux) is actually quite painless once you get the hang of it. If you're an important enough customer, you can complain to your FAE and they'll get you access to unreleased versions with a specific problem fixed. I disagree, I haven't touched Vivado in about 1 year but I doubt it revolutionized itself in 2020.X . I am going to politely ignore the shear volume of files that get auto-generated, duplicated, cached etc. and make it near impossible to version control. I also won't enumerate the GUI bugs that are only resolved with TCL scripting. However, as of 2019, Vivado was still unable to support VHDL-2008 standard simulations, same thing for packaging IP in VHDL-2008, that is literally 11 years behind in VHDL standard support. In any other industry people would be flipping the table. The problem is they don't make money out of the software they make money selling chips, and that is the wrong incentive to improve the toolchain. I would much rather they charge for the toolchain but actually support it with adequate resources and a sane development roadmap, OR they just accept the lack of budget, capacity, profit in software and open-source it.

UncleOxidant 6y ago

The FPGA companies need help with software because quite frankly, their software sucks - so damn buggy. And yet, here they could get some significant help for not much $$. But Xilinx and Altera prefer having customers locked in. I've long thought that the best way for the smaller players to gain marketshare is for them to actively court open source - not only to allow it, but to encourage and fund it.

sam_bristow 6y ago

FYI it's Claire Wolfe now.

DoingIsLearning 6y ago
Thank you for the correction. The time window I was allowed to edit the comment has passed, perhaps Dang can fix the original comment but otherwise noted.

tn1 6y ago

> It doesn't matter how much IP secret sauce Xilinx or Altera have in their fabric, every single team out there hates the locked in toolchain and is slowed down by it in a non-negligible way. Unfortunately this isn't really a compelling reason to switch for most shops. The choice of FPGA is entirely driven by the features of the parts that the vendor offers. Salespeople talk to the relevant engineers and a part + pricing is negotiated accordingly. Once you start pushing the limits of what your part can do, your design necessarily becomes tied to the details of the chip. The secret sauce is the reason why a specific part is bought! At least Vivado (on Linux) is actually quite painless once you get the hang of it. If you're an important enough customer, you can complain to your FAE and they'll get you access to unreleased versions with a specific problem fixed.

DoingIsLearning 6y ago
I have to agree with the comment from bsder, unless you are doing heavy-duty video, RADAR, or RF comms the large majority of chips are never fully utilized, these business are really quite dependent on sales pitches/push. For the large majority of clients they just need to implement a small/medium time critical task. > At least Vivado (on Linux) is actually quite painless once you get the hang of it. If you're an important enough customer, you can complain to your FAE and they'll get you access to unreleased versions with a specific problem fixed. I disagree, I haven't touched Vivado in about 1 year but I doubt it revolutionized itself in 2020.X . I am going to politely ignore the shear volume of files that get auto-generated, duplicated, cached etc. and make it near impossible to version control. I also won't enumerate the GUI bugs that are only resolved with TCL scripting. However, as of 2019, Vivado was still unable to support VHDL-2008 standard simulations, same thing for packaging IP in VHDL-2008, that is literally 11 years behind in VHDL standard support. In any other industry people would be flipping the table. The problem is they don't make money out of the software they make money selling chips, and that is the wrong incentive to improve the toolchain. I would much rather they charge for the toolchain but actually support it with adequate resources and a sane development roadmap, OR they just accept the lack of budget, capacity, profit in software and open-source it.