( ESNUG 376 Item 15 ) ------------------------------------------- [08/29/01]
Subject: ( DAC 01 #41 ) Cooley Shouldn't Publish Anon Anti-eASICs Letters
> "eASIC claimed 60 Kgates/mm^2 at 0.13 micron, and pulled standard cell
> number down from 200K to 120K for more favorable comparison. They
> implement logic with SRAM-based look-up-tables. Claim 20 nW/gate/MHz
> power, vs 15 for std cell and 500 for FPGA. Their number is too low
> relative to std cell to be believable."
>
> - Deepak Sherlekar of In-Chip Systems
>
>
> "Biggest Lie? Zvi OrBach of eASIC said he can do 20-30 K gates/mm^2 of
> FPGA programmable logic within his one-mask programmable core. Xilinx
> and Altera are just now breaking 2 K gates/mm^2 when they do them in
> full custom logic, and they do this a lot better than eASIC."
>
> - [ An Anon Engineer ]
From: Zeev Wurman <zeev@ieee.org>
John,
Now, I think this goes a bit too far. Clearly the idiot does not understand
anything about FPGAs internal structure, nor did he (she?) bother to learn
what is the difference between our technology and FPGA. Putting this in
writing does not reflect on him -- he is anonymous after all -- but on you.
I assume that you don't follow in depth what is happening in the embedded
FPGA arena, or follow every gory detail of silicon manufacturing. Nor
should you, being focused mostly on the front-end of the design process.
Speaking as a "heavily prejudiced" person, I think that eASIC technology
represents the first breakthrough in the backend design in over a decade.
Now, it does sound pretentious, and maybe it is. Nothing is done until it
is done. But I would encourage you to spend 20 minutes on our web site
(www.easic.net) - there is a reasonable amount of technical details there.
Please, do not write "he's a liar" by some anonymous guy without getting at
least some substantiation. Jonathan Rose participated in the DAC'01 panel
about this technology and he did not even hint that "this does not make
sense", or that "it's too good to be true." We have Jason Cong and Larry
Pileggi on our board of advisors - they are not complete dummies either.
Had the guy said "he promised me something and then he didn't do it", at
least it would had been a personal statement based on presumably personal
experience. Quoting someone essentially saying "I did not understand what
he said, so he must be a liar" is somewhat different.
- Ze'ev Wurman, CEO
eASIC Corp. San Jose, CA
[ Editor's Note: A total of 4 EDA Vendors spoke up about their dislike
of seeing anonymous user letters in ESNUG and/or Trip Reports. - John ]
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