Lattice Semiconductor fits that profile perfectly. So, the best way to make excellent FPGA tools is to already have an FPGA company with real customers, existing tools, and a lot of experience. Then, over a long period of trial and error evolution, those tools can gradually become useful. To produce working FPGA design tools, one must first have a good set of non-working FPGA design tools and a large sample of designers willing to endure the frustration of discovering how and why those tools don’t work. (Or in five years.) In fact, without a significant number of users and a feedback loop to the developers, it is unlikely they would ever produce a successful working set of FPGA design tools.
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To riff on the theme from the venerable “Mythical Man Month,” an infinite number of software engineers could not produce a working set of FPGA tools in one year. Why are tools perhaps the hardest part? First, tools take both time and experience. To compete, then, an FPGA company has to have an architecture (this is the easy part), enough money to get that architecture produced on a competitive process node (second easiest part), a sales and support organization that can make customers successful (this is where it gets really tricky), and a robust set of tools (which may well be the hardest thing). The world is littered with the corpses of failed startup companies attempted by some very savvy members of our industry.) Any company with the appropriate financial resources (and very little risk aversion) can draw up a new FPGA architecture, send it off to a company with a semiconductor fab, and start selling chips. It has to differentiate itself and derive all of its value purely from intellectual property and services.įPGA architectures are now well-known entities and are mostly beyond the reach of patent protection. Since the company does not own its own production line, it doesn’t really make anything. A fabless semiconductor company (as all FPGA companies are) is a curious entity.