With respect to opening the backend: it's also unlikely that your competitor is going to use your PnR against you, between patent encumbrance and backend silico

With respect to opening the backend: it's also unlikely that your competitor is going to use your PnR against you, between patent encumbrance and backend silicon differences, no? This is the exact same argument as in graphics where AMD have done fine open-sourcing their compiler backends, nobody is going to cut-rate clone their silicon and NVidia are staying far, far away from any of the methods+processes there if they are smart. With that said, I don't understand the FPGA market well enough to know if open tooling would be an advantage competitively. With respect to opening documentation: I really do wonder. I don't know the market well enough. For a "we need an FPGA because we need XYZ to be fast and don't have the volume/$ to tape out," of course a good PnR and meeting timing is the #1 concern, and a savvy buyer would choose the best performing solution even if the software suite is brutal to use. But for "we need a PLD for some glue logic, it doesn't need to be 100% blazing fast, it needs to meet XYZ requirements," would a buyer choose a toolchain that worked better and let their engineers go to market faster, even if the PnR wasn't quite as efficient? In that case, opening up documentation and letting the open-source ecosystem build out support could be valuable. What would be telling here would be whether Lattice have seen a measurable sales impact from the reverse engineered open toolchain appearing for their parts. I cynically think that perhaps the idea is futile in this industry, but that's also what everyone thought about graphics and AMD went and did it anyway...