FPGA Journal Update

Synopsys is no stranger to the FPGA market. They have made several fateful forays onto the playing field of programmable logic in the past. Like Salvador Dali’s “Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea Which at Twenty Meters Becomes the Portrait of Abraham Lincoln,” the true nature of Synopsys’ FPGA strategy was best observed from a distance. From up-close, it appeared that they were putting meager development effort into a mediocre product that was nearly given away in the EDA industry’s closest thing to a commodity tools market. From far away, however, maybe even with your eyes blurred a bit, another explanation emerged. It is possible that the company, whose lifeblood was a 9-digit annual income from ASIC synthesis, was entering the FPGA market as a defensive strategy. By offering adequate tools for a pittance, they helped discourage the fledgling FPGA synthesis suppliers from gaining the monetary momentum that would allow an upstart competitor to develop synthesis technology that could compete with their flagship Design Compiler.

That was then, and this is now. The new reality has three important differences from the days when Synopsys last actively played in FPGA. First is the fact that the high-end ASIC synthesis market is now driven by risk aversion rather than technology leadership. Most design team managers who value their jobs are not going to gamble an NRE on any tool other than the one that has proven itself on thousands of ASIC designs, regardless of the possible features, benefits, and productivity gains offered by a competitive tool. Second, although Synopsys’ strategy may have postponed the inevitable, a competitor, Synplicity, has managed to develop synthesis technology that rivals theirs. Third, with design starts migrating to FPGA from every direction – ASIC, DSP, SoC, and ASSP, it is impossible to maintain a belief that an ASIC-centric market will continue to account for the majority of EDA revenue. In the same painful way that the FPGA market had to come to grips with the necessary diversification beyond telecom, the EDA market must now accept that building more and more expensive and complex tools for a smaller and smaller ASIC design community is not the path to growth. [more]

Raising the Bar
Nallatech elevates FPGA-based system design

It’s fun sometimes to see how the pros do things. I find it inspiring (and a little bit humbling) to watch someone who’s good enough at what they do to throw the book away and use their intimate, almost intuitive understanding of the subject to accomplish great things with an elegance of simplicity that belies the difficulty of the task.

Nallatech, LTD. of Scotland is well known as one of the leading experts in Xilinx FPGAs. They provide a wide range of high-performance computing products on FPGA-based platforms as well as developing custom solutions for specific clients. In interviewing them about one of their recent projects, I immediately got the sensation of watching masters at work.

Their challenge was to design a complex multi-board image processing system with a mass storage interface. They had to complete the design in only 4 months combining digital signal processing (DSP), high-speed serial interfaces, and multiple system-on-chip designs with parallel processors and custom hardware and software components. What they brought to the party was a highly experienced team, previous designs from which they could borrow technology, and an established design process with the flexibility to incorporate innovation. [more]

Tilting at Tech Market Windmills
The debate over Dataquest numbers

In John Cooley’s column last week, he raised long overdue questions on the myth of market share perpetuated by Dataquest’s annual pilgrimage down the mountain with their stone scoreboards showing who supposedly won the year-before-last championship in the FPGA synthesis market. Perhaps we should suppress our collective yawns long enough to take a look at the relevance and reliability of the metrics provided by these market-share mavens.

Every year about this time, Dataquest sends out their analysis of various technology markets. Among those is a measure of the relative market share of EDA tools in various categories such as FPGA synthesis. The report unceremoniously declares the size of the market segment and the product revenue claimed by each competitor. Then, through the miracle of Microsoft Excel, it provides the percent of market share for each. The business model for this is curious and clever. The research firm essentially collects data from each company, then sells the same data back to them a year later after summarizing, sanitizing, and cross-checking it. [more]