Happy Birthday to Us
FPGA Journal Turns Two

It’s time again to bring home that cake from the grocery store bakery, ditch the box, mess around with the frosting a bit so it looks more “homemade,” and tell the guests that you spent all afternoon baking it. FPGA Journal is turning 24 months old (that’s 11000 for those of you that absolutely can’t let go of binary math, even for a party). Since October 1, 2003, we’ve brought you hundreds of feature articles, thousands of press releases, a good number of controversies, and 104 weekly e-mail newsletters.

This week, in addition to our 2-year anniversary, we’re celebrating the launch of our new sister publication: “Embedded Technology Journal.” We think Embedded Technology is a good companion to FPGA Journal, with a little bit of overlap and a whole lot of new audience and material to cover. If your FPGA designs are part of embedded system designs (or if your embedded system designs are inside your latest FPGA), you will probably want to subscribe to that publication as well. In pre-release it broke all records with over 4,000 subscribers pre-registering for the new pub. [more]

Second Annual FPGA Journal Awards
We Tell You Your Favorites - Round 2

Last year, with little fanfare, we presented our first annual FPGA Journal Reader’s choice awards. The response was fantastic, and everybody wanted to know how they could participate in this year’s awards process… It doesn’t work that way, of course. We use a super-secret balloting system and carefully guard the data to prevent any unscrupulous parties from tampering with the results.

This year, over 350 design teams answered our call to rate their experience with FPGA and EDA companies’ products and services. Each customer was required to answer based on a specific design project that they’d already completed, and they were allowed to give responses based only on the products and services they’d actually used. (A user of vendor A’s tools was not allowed to rate vendor B’s products.) We also normalized the results to be sure that nobody had an advantage based on number of responses. We wanted the little guys with just a few customers to have just as good an opportunity to win as some of the big companies with hundreds of users responding.

We double-dog checked the answers (even, cleverly, the IP addresses, e-mail domains and other data that needed to match) to be sure that there were no sneaky faux FPGA users trying to skew the sanctity of our results. To the best of our ability, we certify the following results as accurate within our survey samples. [more]