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The DINI Group Newsletter
July 23, 2007
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* Synplicity/Hardi – DINI comments
* New Harry Potter Book is out (final chapter) …
* Humor for the day (short video)
* New winner: Ugliest Dog
* Bride of Monster coming soon! (DN9000k10)
* See us at ESC Taiwan
* See us at FPL 2007 Amsterdam
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Synplicity/Hardi – DINI comments
It is about time I comment on Synplicity’s acquisition of Hardi.
We were not contacted about a possible sale and not considered. What had been a very close relationship, starting nearly 15 years ago as Ken and Alisa worked out of their house, is now dead.
Synplicity has thrown us under the bus. The combination of Synplicity/Hardi is now a direct competitor. I’m having a hard time imagining what they were thinking.
This acquisition nukes any possible relationship as a potential partner, with us or anybody else. I do not intend to be a “compartnitor” (competitor/partner) to Synplicity/Hardi.
I consider the concept, in practical business application, to be laughably silly – akin to one of those management buzzwords that show up on the bingo cards (See
Buzzword Bingo).
I think I understand the financial reasons, but the intangibles here do not speak well for the future of Synplicity. It is clear that the core business of Synplicity, FPGA synthesis (
Synplify Pro), is in deep trouble – saturated, therefore stagnant, and likely shrinking. A review of
Synplicity Financials over the last three years explains much.
Worse, in the tier 1 FPGA accounts (Xilinx/Altera), the Synplicity synthesis products compete against tools that work quite well and are FREE.
To satisfy institutional investors, Synplicity needed to expand the bottom line and hide this declining revenue.
FPGA hardware to help sell their software looked like an exciting and rapidly growing market. So they jumped in by acquiring Hardi, consequences-be-damned.
This acquisition creates direct competitors out of their oldest, best, and closest allies/customers and permanently terminates the ‘Partner Program’.
Expect ample lip service from Synplicity’s PR/marketing people about how they intend to ‘continue supporting third party hardware’.
In practice, the sparse amount of engineering resources for products such as Certify will be dedicated, almost entirely, to Hardi HW with third party support handled as a distant afterthought.
Strategic thinking of this sort is a classic case of concentrating on short-term gain while ignoring disastrous long-term consequences. Ultimately this action will be judged for what it is: a desperate act.
We were caught flatfooted and are evaluating all other options to Synplicity’s tools.
Since it is unlikely we will have access to Synplicity’s tools in the future, we are in the process of converting our reference designs to alternates.
This doesn't prevent you, as a user of our products, from using Synplicity’s tools; it only affects our ability to support you when trip over Synplicity’s bugs.
For Xilinx synthesis, we are converting to XST, the FREE synthesis tool Xilinx provides with
ISE Foundation. We are finding that XST works fine, even in large/dense V5 LX330 applications.
If we find instances where XST is not up to the task we will work hard with Xilinx to improve it. We are evaluating
Precision RTL from Mentor at the moment, but it is too soon to comment. We have evaluated the partitioning tool from Auspy (
APSII) and I am happy (and a little embarrassed) to state that it betters Certify. I should not have ignored Auspy for so long.
Debug and visibility, troublesome for FPGA’s, remains an issue.
Identify is clearly best in class and the only real alternative is ChipScope. I'm not certain what to do about
TotalRecall, an exciting product concept, but Synplicity wasn't offering it to us anyway.
I encourage you to look at Hardi products, now called
Synplicity Hardware Platforms Group, Call your local Synplicity/Hardi sales engineer and get a presentation and a price quote.
After you have done that, let us show you how we can get you to the same solution at <50% of the cost, with more FPGA’s, higher performance, high reliability, better support, and cheaper tools.
I have (had?) many friends at Synplicity.
I hope I can continue those relationships, but the circumstances will make that, at best, difficult and probably impossible. To my friends at Synplicity: Sorry. I had no idea. I do not intend to let you take my business!
Call or email me if you want to discuss this issue or others. I'm a good gossip. Contact info is below.
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New Harry Potter Book is out (final chapter) …
I'm writing this on Thursday July 18, 2007. On Saturday, the final book in the Harry Potter series will hit the streets and my weekend will officially be filled reading it.
Joanne claims she kills off two of the key characters but hasn't said yet which two.
If you haven't followed this ongoing saga in the last few years this is remarkable, once in lifetime stuff. JK Rowling is the only author that forces me to schedule reading time months in advance.
For those of you ‘adults’ that haven't read this series of books you are missing it. Big time. 200 years from now, the first books young children will read will be something written by La Jolla guy named
Theodor Geisel. After that, the first novels will be these 7 books. Along, of course with the old classics such as
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
War and Peace, and lastly,
Atlas Shrugged
Highly recommended, but read them in order. I made that mistake on the Dune series …
-Update Sat 7/21 – didn't get the book. Waited all day at office.
-Update Sun 7/22 – Still not here. UPS didn't bother to deliver.
-Contacted Amazon. PISSED! Amazon has refunded the cost of the book. Don't care. Want the book
-Update Monday 7/23 11am – Still not here. Life ruined …
-2pm Monday – Got it. UPS subcontracted to USPS and USPS didn't bother delivering on Sat., even though I was camped out here. Still PISSED!
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
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Humor for the day (short video. VERY short)
Safe for viewing at work:
Chuck Storm Walks Into A Poll(sic.)
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New winner: Ugliest Dog
- Meet
Nana, the winner of the 2005 World’s Ugliest Dog Contest.
- This link made me laugh hard. Some people have Photoshop and too much time on their hands:
Ugly Pet Pictures
- More here from a
2006 contest, but no Photoshop.
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‘Bride of Monster’ coming soon! (DN9000k10)
We will continue to develop and market large FPGA boards.
While the Swedes are on their lengthy and MANDATORY summer vacation, expect to see more monstrous, cost effective, high performance,
FPGA boards from us, including the
‘Bride of Monster’ (DN9000k10) with 16 Virtex–5 LX330s.
Many PCIe-based products are in the pipeline also. Many PCIe-based products using Virtex-5 ‘T’ FPGAs are in the pipeline also.
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See us at ESC Taiwan
We will have a booth at the Embedded Systems Conference Taiwan Aug. 23-24. Stop in if you happen to be in Taipei.
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See us at the 17th International Conference on FPGA's and Applications (FPL 2007) in Amsterdam
We have a booth at this show also. A prize for anybody I see at both shows!
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