( ESNUG 458 Item 5 ) -------------------------------------------- [11/16/06]
Subject: ( ELSE 06 #13 ) Leonardo worked well while Precision screwed us!
> THE GOOD OLDE DAYS -- If you talk to a Mentor Precision salesman, if he's
> drunk and being honest, he'll probably tell you that his biggest rival is
> Synplicity and the "free" RTL synthesis tools from Xilinx and Altera. But
> from what I hear from a few of the really pissed off users is that his
> biggest rival is their very own Leonardo Spectrum! Those are the few
> leftover diehard Leonard fans; if you read on you'll see that most of the
> Mentor FPGA customers have moved on to Precision.
>
> - from http://www.deepchip.com/items/else06-13.html
From: [ Me No Happy ]
Hi John,
Please keep me Anon.
I joined my previous company around 7 years ago. We developed ASICs in PC
peripherals and used FPGAs extensively for compatibility/performance testing
of new developments. We also used FPGAs to allow the software guys to get
a head start.
At that time we used Leonardo exclusively for all our FPGA synthesis work.
We were very happy with the results. About 3 years ago we upgraded to their
new Precision -- we thought this would be the best thing to do, as we wanted
to work with the FPGA synthesizer that would continue to be supported.
It turned out to be a bad move for us. When I left my previous company
(earlier this year) I had just finished working on a typical project which
had required the ASIC to be ported to 2 different FPGAs: one FPGA was for a
marketing pre-silicon demo, the other FPGA was a development board for the
software guys.
Precision appeared to give good results at first. However, it's tendency to
quietly and ruthlessly optimise parts of the design away cost us time and
money. We ended up chasing a number of what we thought were bugs with our
design -- that turned out to be bugs in the output from Precision.
Another issue was the instability between versions. A minor version upgrade
could render a previously fully functional FPGA image crippled.
I haven't worked with Precision for a few months now, but I think I would
have to think long and hard before using it on any future project.
- [ Me No Happy ]
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