EE Times Gabe Moretti has a followup to some comments in an article posted a couple of weeks ago in EDADesignLine by Mark LaPedus. In the article, Simon Bloch of Mentor says that EDA tools are running out of gas. What he means is that is not worth the investment for a company like Mentor to develop tools for synthesis of FPGA’s from vendors like Altera and Xilinx.

Both vendors are including synthesis tools that work as well as if not better then Synplicity from Synopsys or Precision from Mentor and cost much less to purchase and maintain. A hardware manager faced with a decision to spend more money for third party tools or to use what is already included in the (often) free copies of ISE or Quartus, will pick the free route every time.

The FPGA houses of course have an advantage over any third party in that they can develop new synthesis algorythms in conjunction with their process improvements. As both fabs turn out 40nm devices, their in-house libraries are already debugged and ready to go. With that development capability it is nearly impossible for a third party tool vendor to compete.

EE Times Article

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Tags: fpga, Verilog, VHDL

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