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by Jack Horgan - Contributing Editor Posted anew every four weeks or so, the EDA WEEKLY delivers to its readers information concerning the latest happenings in the EDA industry, covering vendors, products, finances and new developments. Frequently, feature articles on selected public or private EDA companies are presented. Brought to you by EDACafe.com. If we miss a story or subject that you feel deserves to be included, or you just want to suggest a future topic, please contact us! Questions? Feedback? Click here. Thank you!

They tend to focus around algorithm design, co-design, verification and modeling of systems using these high level languages. Those are still the most popular uses. Certainly in our business we are seeing a lot of adoption of C based synthesis by non-traditional customers. 80% of our customer base would probably fall into the system and algorithm designer category with a smattering of software. Only about 20% of our business comes from traditional hardware design. In our business we are seeing every day the growth every day in non-traditional EDA. A lot of what people are using these tools for is the ability to take an algorithm and split it out between a processor and custom hardware, particularly programmable hardware but it could also be structured ASICs design in order to get better performance of their design in terms of speed, power, throughput and just the efficiency of usage. A lot of the hits on FPGAs in the past as programmable logic devices are for example that they are more expensive and have lower performance than an ASIC. While that's still going to be true, if you look at the cost of getting into an FPGA design in the future, they are minimal compared to an ASIC design. If you look at the cost of getting into an FPGA versus say another processor, the FPGA is much, much cheaper and actual has the capability of accelerating the performance We're seeing the applications reflect that. Instead of people taking a design and adding another Pentium or ARM processor or very expensive chips, they are actually going to augment that by putting in an FPGA device. An FPGA might be $100 per part but it is 10x cheaper or one-tenth the price of that processor they were going to use before because it tends to accelerate things in a more parallel fashion than the processor to give you a much better performance increase. We are seeing 10x to 100x performance increases in algorithm acceleration and much lower power. It's a better power picture than you get from a processor. Because of the ESL tools we give them the capability to program it We are seeing that the FPGA versus ASIC trend still holds basically due to the non-recurring engineering costs and performance. If you need something with high performance and you can't get away with an FPGA, then you choose ASIC. The NRE might drive you from ASIC towards FPGA. We looked at some additional factors as well like reconfigurability, prototyping and software acceleration for why people might choose FPGA over ASIC. One of the encouraging things for the FPGA guys is that very few people, maybe 10%, consider FPGAs as glue logic. Most people are considering them as integral processors in their designs. On the design side the trend shows that there are very few people in our survey that are using FPGAs as programmable logic devices that are very small. In fact there are a lot more people using ASIC designs that are very small. The FPGA guys can feel secure that if they out big FPGAs there will be people there to use them because there is demand for as many Gigs as you can get in these coprocessor type developments. Performance wise FPGAs have obviously less performance than ASICs but surprisingly we are seeing pretty good correspondence between the two. There are still more people hanging around the 100MHz and 250MHz node and FPGAs are well able to handle that. It's not necessarily always performance that is driving the switch from FPGA to ASIC. In fact

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