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First Annual FPGA Journal
Awards
We Tell You Your Favorites
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.
Without further pageantry, and with no celebrities or comedians to read
the results, here are the winners:
Highest reader/customer satisfaction with an FPGA vendor’s
tools:
Altera for their Quartus II suite of
design tools
You told us that Altera has made great strides in its tool
suite over the past two years, particularly with the performance
and quality of the Quartus II place-and-route tools. They also
got high marks from many for their SOPC Builder embedded system
tools working with their Nios soft processor core.
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Highest reader/customer satisfaction with an FPGA vendor’s
support:
Xilinx for their support staff, application
engineers, documentation, and website
You told us that Xilinx consistently sets the standard
for support staff and resources that understand your problems
and their products and go the extra mile to make you successful
in your project.
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Highest reader/customer satisfaction with an FPGA vendor’s
devices:
Lattice Semiconductor for their CPLD devices
You told us that, while CPLD may not be the glamour segment
of the programmable logic industry, Lattice devices consistently
and reliably deliver the features and performance that the
datasheet claims, solving your CPLD problems in a cost-effective,
reliable manner.
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Highest reader/customer satisfaction with an EDA vendor’s
HDL simulator performance, capacity, and reliability:
Mentor Graphics for their ModelSim simulator
You told us that, in addition to being the dominant HDL
simulator in the FPGA market, ModelSim delivers best in many
of the categories most important to design teams working against
a schedule. This was actually three separate categories, and
ModelSim swept them all.
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Highest reader/customer satisfaction with an EDA vendor’s
HDL simulator price/value and ease-of-use:
Aldec for their ActiveHDL simulator
You told us that Aldec’s simulator is extremely approachable
and easy to learn. You like Aldec’s whole-solution approach
to simulation and debug and their clear focus on FPGA design
in particular. You also found Aldec’s tools to be an
outstanding value for the price.
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Highest reader/customer satisfaction with an EDA vendor’s
synthesis tool’s performance, quality of results, reliability,
and ease of use:
Synplicity for their Synplify and Synplify-Pro
tools
You told us that Synplicity’s products clearly lead
the synthesis field for FPGA. Many of you said you were happy
to pay the additional cost of Synplicity’s 3 rd party
tools over the FPGA vendor-supplied synthesis products in order
to get vendor independence, an edge on quality of results,
HDL language support, and “blazing fast compile times.”
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Well, there they are – our first year winners.
There will be no little gold statues (hey, we’re on a budget here)
or long acceptance speeches. It pays to note that many of these were
very close competitions on our rating system, but subjective feedback
from follow-up e-mails never failed to validate our winners. With all
the exciting new product announcements and introductions of the past
few months, we expect that the next year will be even more interesting.
Kevin Morris, FPGA and Programmable Logic Journal
October 5, 2004
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