Lattice Breaks the Rules
Slips SerDes into Low-Cost FPGA

FPGAs fall into two distinct camps – high-performance and low-cost. For several years, the rules and conventions of these strata have been established and followed by FPGA companies. Low-cost or value-based FPGAs are designed with cost as the first priority. Every spare feature is thrown overboard in order to minimize die size and production cost, leading to the lowest possible price-per-LUT for a given amount of programmable fabric. High-end FPGAs, on the other hand, spare no expense in offering the maximum performance and the richest feature sets.

The silicon selection rules for FPGA designers have been, therefore, rather easy to understand. If you have a high-volume, cost-sensitive application, you go for the value-based FPGA. If you need advanced features like DSP blocks, super-fast clock speeds, and the queen of all high-end features – SerDes transceivers, you popped out the checkbook and went for the exotic high-performance families. It was unambiguous. You were in either group A or group B. There was no middle ground. [more]

Connecting the Camps
Mathworks Bridges System and Hardware Design

It happens from time to time. Some well-meaning high-tech company notices that they've got some pretty cool design tool technology and says to themselves, "Hey, we've got some cool design tool technology. Let's jump into the EDA market! " These are fateful thoughts, however - best pushed aside. In practical terms, they are akin to "Hey, I've got myself a pretty cool racing bike – I think I'll compete in the Tour de France!" Sometimes, though, a company that, perhaps, developed some nice tools for their own internal use, feels just too tempted and takes that ill-advised plunge. The results are typically disastrous. These adventurers usually soon discover that creating tool technology is the easy part. Getting electronic designers to adopt and depend on your software, regardless of how novel and necessary it may seem, is a much more daunting challenge.

The MathWorks is bucking that trend, however, because they've approached the problem from a different direction. First, they won the hearts and minds of the electronic design community with their general purpose (non-EDA-specific) tools like MATLAB and Simulink. Then, when they apparently noticed that they had thousands of seats of software in places where only EDA companies typically played, they set about developing domain-specific technology to try and capitalize on that market presence. [more]