> My conclusion is that the whole digital circuit design industry is ripe for disruption by open source... I've seen this claim many times before, but I never

> My conclusion is that the whole digital circuit design industry is ripe for disruption by open source... I've seen this claim many times before, but I never see any proposals about exactly how that would happen. All open source FPGA tools that exist today are good enough for fun hobby projects (I use them every once in a while), but none of them have the additional features that are needed in the real world. When pressed about it, people point to 50GB downloads, bad GUIs, and bugs in the tooling. Not that these aren't issues, but if that's all you can point to, then I don't see where the disruption will come from? In order to have that many bugs and 50GB of tools download, you need tons of code to begin with, and the functionality that it implements. Right now, that's not there, and it very likely never will. It's such a niche domain.