Light the candles …er… candle, sing the song, pummel the piñata, and uncork the champagne. It’s been one year since FPGA Journal’s first edition, and it’s time to look back and celebrate our inaugural year. Our lights first came on October 1, 2003 when FPGA Journal Update Volume I Number 1 went out to about 1,000 early subscribers. During the year that followed, our newsletter subscription base has grown to over 8,500 and our web audience to over 34,000 readers in 87 countries.

We’ve worked hard over the past year to keep you informed, entertained and even a little intrigued as we’ve covered the events and evolution of programmable logic technology, tools, techniques and trends. This week, we thought we’d review a few of the more interesting things we’ve bumped into over the past twelve months and kick off year number two with a bang.

According to the information that you, our readers, have supplied, most of you are design engineers, engineering management, or executives overseeing engineering development projects. Some of you have been designing with programmable logic for years, and others are just starting out in programmable logic from backgrounds as diverse as embedded systems programming, digital signal processing, ASIC design, and system-on-board design. While the majority of you are working electrical, software, and systems engineering professionals, over 20% are either educators or students, and just over 10% are “industry insiders” working for programmable logic or EDA companies or distributors. About half of you (just over 18,000) visit our site at least once a month, and many visit almost every day. [more]

Over the course of the first year, we’ve had a tremendous amount of feedback and input from you, our readers. We’ve also done several formal surveys and studies that have spanned the entire year, with follow-up e-mails to many of you to clarify just what you meant by assertions like “…works very reliably except when it fails.” Here, then, we are proud to present back to you some of the things you told us - your favorite suppliers and products in a variety of categories – in the form of awards.

The primary data for determining the winners came from our online surveys of completed FPGA projects. Respondents were those who had completed a real FPGA project within the past year, and answers were tabulated based on responses related to those completed projects. We asked you to rank the importance of a number of factors in choosing your device, your tools, and the vendors that sold them to you. We then asked you to rate how well your particular vendors and products performed in each of those categories. We multiplied the importance by the performance, averaged the responses for each vendor and product, and – voila! The scorecard for the First Annual FPGA Journal Awards was born. [more]