( SNUG 01 Item 1 ) --------------------------------------------- [ 3/28/01 ]
Subject: Wally Rhines Keynote At HDL Con'01 -- FPGA's Rule!
FPGAs WILL RULE THE WORLD: Wally Rhines, CEO of Mentor Graphics, gave the
Keynote Address at HDL COon'01 and it was basically a Motherhood & Apple
Pie speech on how FPGAs will Rule The World. ( Santarini covered it in:
http://www.eet.com/story/design/OEG20010302S0060 )
"You can do multiple passes without people finding out you
did multiple passes."
- Wally Rhines, CEO of Mentor, on one of the big
advantages of designing FPGAs instead of ASICs
"In 1980, we had ~2000 custom designers. In 1990, we had about
20,000 custom designers. In 2010, it's projected we'll have
around 200,000 custom/semi-custom designers. In 1980, designers
designed roughly 2,000 gates per chip. In 1990, that jumped to
20,000 gates per chip. In 2010, it'll average out to 200,000 gates
per chip, when it should be more like 30 million gates per designer
per chip if you follow the curves. To make up for this production gap,
1 in every 30 people on Earth will be have to be doing FPGA design."
- Wally Rhines, CEO of Mentor
Wally forsees massive IP reuse (in this future of mostly FPGA designs) to
enable design productivity gains and EDA software having to become much more
bugfree and robust. "With 200,000 designers using FPGA tools, you can't
afford to have a staff answering the phone when the customers encounter
bugs," said Wally. "I know that you don't associate this with EDA vendors,
but we have to make our software more bulletproof."
"Wally Rhines (CEO Mentor) was the HDL Con Keynote speaker. Talked
alot about porting FPGAs from ASIC designs. He did mention the
performance difference between ASICs and FPGAs."
- Dan Joyce of Compaq
"HDL Con Key Note speaker - Wally Rines - CEO Mentor Graphics
60% of FPGA designers use VHDL, 20% use Verilog. This seems to be
because FPGAs are designed at more of a system level than a chip level.
Due to VHDL-AMS, and FPGAs HDL users are going to increase by an order
of magnitude over the next few years. People will be going to
"platform based design", using an FPGA, which as a CPU core (or DSP);
memory, Buss management, and IP integrated into one chip. Team based
FPGA design will become a big thing."
- [ Kenny, from South Park ]
"Adam Smith ("Wealth of Nations") is giving programmable logic a great
economic hand job. With the rising costs of masks, only a few will
be able to afford doing standard cells. Everything else goes
programmable. Now the EDA world just needs to figure out how to make
money at providing FPGA tools. Synplicity has proved that it can
(sorta) be done. I don't think the PLD industry paid Wally to say
what he did, but they probably should have."
- [ Zul, The EDA Marketing Demi-God ]
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