Subject: An absurd $64,000 price and slow performance killed off GateRocket

> So what killed GateRocket?  "I did an extensive search and I couldn't
> find a single mention of an actual customer; not one," wrote Brian.
>
> Long story short, it looks REALLY bad if your 7 year old start-up still
> didn't have at least one independent user review of your tool on the web.
>
>    - John Cooley of DeepChip.com
>      http://www.deepchip.com/wiretap/110818.html


From: [ Not Me ]

Hi, John,

As someone who lived near GateRocket EDA and followed their trip, I could
see their demise back in 2008 and so was not surprised at what happened.

First of all, being RocketDrive was a single FPGA board, it is basically an
FPGA prototype development board.  The market for FPGA development boards is
very crowded, very competitive and very cost sensitive.

So GateRocket entered a very crowded market.  The price range for FPGA
prototype development boards range from a high of $20,000 which included the
top of the line FPGA's such as Virtex 6 and Stratix 4, plus they throw in
the IDE/IDK and Modelsim.  To a low of free where they give away the FPGA
development boards.  The range in general goes from $50 to $300.

Guess what Gaterocket wanted for their boards?

$64,000!!!!  Are they kidding!?  Maybe if it was for ASIC development
departments, but ASIC houses work at the 100 *million* logic gate sizes,
not the 100 *thousand* FPGA gate size.

Next, they said their product was wonderful because it plugs into Modelsim!

Guess what, Xilinx has Chipscope and Atlera has Signaltap, free and included
with their respective ISE's.  And they work pretty good and get the job done
just about as well as Modelsim when it comes to interfacing.  So why bother
with Modelsim for debug?

Finally when it comes to simulation speed, yes, running sims on 100 million
logic gate ASIC's takes a lot of resources.

For FPGA's, with 10k to 100k logic sizes, today's logic simulators do just
fine, or at least the runs times are measured in minutes and not hours, if
it is an intense simulation.  Again, no real need to GateRocket.

The way I look at, I just could see not any justification to spend $64,000
just to get a little better debug ability or increase in simulation speed,
especially with FPGA projects that are very cost sensitive to begin with.

    - [ Not Me ]

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From: Wesley Kirk <wes.kirk=user domain=nsn got calm>

Hi, John,

About GateRocket... They've tried to sell us their stuff for about 4 years
now.  I've had several conversations with Dave Orecchio over the years about
why we didn't need their tool.

Probably the biggest problem for my team, Gaterocket didn't support two GXBs
connected to create a full high speed serial link.  I think they got it
working in the last year, but it was too late.

However, I am a verification specialist and I am typically responsible for
testbench architecture, regression sims, and coverage vs. requirements.
Dave's team actually evaluated one of our testbenches and they achieved a
3x speed improvement.  To me, that's not near enough.  10x probably wouldn't
be enough because I can get that by adding 3 Linux boxes to our cluster for
$8k and get 12 processors.  GateRocket couldn't beat that price.  Obviously,
the linux boxes can do a lot more for the money, not just simulations, etc.

Besides, we have our own FPGA prototyping platform eventually - the proto
board of our end product.

My opinion is that the price was wrong.  I think they would have had to come
in at about $5k-$8k to be able to get out business.  I think their original
quote to us (3 years ago) was about $30k.

     - Wesley Kirk
       Nokia Siemens Networks                    Fort Worth, TX