Sure, that's the vendor lock-in that Xilinx and Altera both bank on - A sort of Stockholm syndrome. But as newer players enter the FPGA field (a lot of the basi

Sure, that's the vendor lock-in that Xilinx and Altera both bank on - A sort of Stockholm syndrome. But as newer players enter the FPGA field (a lot of the basic FPGA patents have expired over the last five years or so) open source is going to be the best bet for them to both get decent tools and win some market share. It's not like Xilinx/Altera will lose any significant market share anytime soon, but I can see a slow erosion on the lower end over the next 10 years or so. It'll probably look like the FPGA pie getting bigger with newer players (like Lattice) expanding into the smaller design niche. BigCorp has apparently been doing FPGA designs for many years now, but there are a lot of smaller companies that are just starting to consider jumping into doing FPGA designs.