Getting Through The EDA Tools Thicket

This week at the Design Automation Conference, vendors and participants will grapple with the role of electronic design automation tools in the programmable logic market.

As Freud might have said, "What do designers want?"

The first level of confusion between EDA vendors and users in the programmable logic market occurs because programmable logic devices, even field-programmable gate arrays, are not gate arrays. Upon first entering this market, EDA vendors seem to expect that tweaked ASIC tools will fulfill FPGA user needs.

While gate array architecture is essentially generic, FPGA architecture varies substantially between vendors and, indeed, this is the value-added property of FPGAs. The interconnect and device...