Industry Expert Blogs

A FPGA company makes revenue with the hardware: it sells its device, and gives away its design tools –synthesis, place-and-route. Yet the EDA industry has had success with its own (non-free) FPGA synthesis solutions. For good reasons: in its days, Synplicity’s Synplify was the best FPGA synthesis out there. Synopsys acquired Synplicity two years ago, but it was more to get a comprehensive emulation solution than pushing FPGA synthesis. Mentor Graphics is still invested in FPGA synthesis with Precision, but lags behind Xilinx’ XST and Altera’s Quartus.

In a world where FPGA software design is expected to be free (or very cheap, compared to it ASIC counterpart), is there still a market for EDA companies to sell their FPGA solutions? Synplicity stopped growing after it built its success on FPGA synthesis. Is that the fate of EDA for FPGA?

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