( SNUG 02 Item 13 ) -------------------------------------------- [ 5/15/02 ]
Subject: Synplicity Synplify FPGA, Mentor Exemplar, Synopsys FPGA Tools
SYNPLICITY RULES: One of the biggest business mistakes Synopsys did in the
FPGA synthesis market was to team up with Xilinx in an exclusive OEM
agreement. All that Xilinx cares about is selling their chips; they're
honestly not all that concerned what EDA tools their customers use. Because
of this, Synopsys completely lost direct touch with FPGA synthesis users.
Dataquest FY 2000 FPGA Synthesis Market (in $ Millions)
Synplicity ####################### $22.7 (45%)
Mentor/Exemplar ################### $18.7 (39%)
Synopsys ##### $7.1 (14%)
others ## $2.0 (4%)
Last year Synopsys owned 35% of this market. Now they only have 14%! The
other gotcha for Synopsys in this scenario is that in this year's SNUG'02
survey, 38% of users are using FPGAs to prototype their ASIC designs. From
the marketshare numbers and the user comments below, Synplicity rules this
niche. This mean Synplicity has a synthesis 'in' with at least (45% of 38%)
17% of the ASICs being designed -- not exactly a bad place from which to
springboard a new ASIC synthesis tool. (But to be fair, Exemplar's had an
ASIC synthesis tool for years now, and it's *no* threat to DC whatsoever.)
"We're seeing the entire FPGA synthesis market going flat this year.
This is probably due to the fact that PCB designs have had a
negative book-to-bill ratio for the past year. They're driving down
the number of FPGA design starts."
- Gary Smith of Dataquest
"Regarding FPGA Express, their results are very disappointing. Synplify
has much better results in FPGA synthesis."
- an anon engineer
"I have evalusted these FPGA tools head to head probably 3 times in the
last 7 years. Synplicity has won hands down each time. It's easy to
use and faster. Results of each are fairly similar but it took a lot
more work on the two other tools to get the same results.
- Scott Vincelette of Flarion
"We're in the middle of evaluating all three tools. Haven't really
exercised Exemplar, yet. Between Synplicity and Synopsys, Synplicity
worked better for us for ASIC prototyping. Note: we're NOT doing
FPGA designs; we're prototyping large ASICs, and so our coding style
is not optimized for FPGAs. We got better results much faster out
of Synplicity.
Synopsys, though is very interested in our ASIC prototyping problem.
They seem to be putting resources into improving FPGA Compiler II, so
that their latest release (3.7) improves their compile time greatly.
Haven't evaluated it yet. I'll let you know our eval results later."
- an anon engineer
"Forget Synopsys in the FPGA race, they have really dropped the ball.
Synplicity and Exemplar will remain the leaders. Synplicity will
win the new users. Exemplar will win the power users. Pushbutton
vs. Depth of Control. I own Exemplar, many of my clients own both.
They each have issues, but I feel Exemplar has better control and
depth to the tool. Marketing wise I think Synplicity is winning;
but is really beginning to have problems with incremental synthesis
linked with FPGA P&R tools. Amplify is just another way to make
money. They learned well from Synopsys. (Can you say PhysOpt?)"
- Tom Tessier of t2design
"Synplify seems solid in FPGAs. FPGA Express has always seemed lacking.
Never tried Exemplar."
- Kevin Hubbard of Siemens
"Synplicity for FPGAs. Popular, simple, and produces good results."
- Scott Campbell of Motorola
"As far as I know, FPGA Express is dead. We haven't tried FPGA
Compiler II. Synplicity is good but is often too smart for my
own good. We chose Synplicity over FPGA Express for our 200 MHz
Virtex E and Virtex 2 designs because we seem to need the extra knobs
to tweak synthesis results. So far, we've met our goal of not using
schematics or hand-placement to achieve our performance targets in
the slow speed grade Virtex 2."
- an anon enineer
"Synplicity is on top, with Exemplar a very close #2. FPGA Express
(which is actually a dead product now, replaced by FPGA Compiler II)
is a distant third. I field about 20 FPGA design questions every
week, with only a few ASIC questions, so I know a great deal about
this issue. I grade these FPGA tools on:
1) Quality of output
a) Accuracy
b) Speed (of resulting design)
2) VHDL constructs the tool understands
3) Support for new FPGAs
Thus my main stream FPGA tool is Synplicity. I keep a copy of
Exemplar around as a second opinion, and I have dropped support on
my FPGA Express seats."
- David Bishop of Kodak
"I use FPGA Express. I haven't really compared these because when
working on a design, usually the FPGA chip supplier already has
libraries and things setup for FPGA Express, so that's what I've
been using."
- Donald Whisnant of John Deere
"I don't know much about Exemplar, but I am very familiar with Synopsys
FPGA Express/FPGA Compiler II (FC2) and Synplify Pro for FPGAs. I have
used both for real designs. No contest. Synplify Pro wins hands down,
walking away. It is faster. It covers more of the VHDL language. It
supports inferring single or dual port (either distributed or block)
RAMs from arrays in RTL. It makes better use of built-in arithmetic
carry logic. Synplify's schematic creation/viewing abilities are far
beyond the feeble attempts by FC2. It works with directly instantiated
entities/architectures, instead of dumping core with no warnings,
messages, etc. as does FC2, even though Synopsys directly states in
their manuals that this is supported.
Last summer, the Synopsys FC2 marketing team came in here as part of
their marketing "We care about FPGAs" blitz. This was right after last
year's SNUG'01 when FC2 did not even have a booth at R&D night. When
I asked them about RAM inferencing from RTL, they got this confused
look on their faces, and asked, "Why would you want that?" Their
competitors know why I want it. Try storing enumerated state variables
in instantiated Xilinx RAM primitives; you'll see what I mean. Better
yet, try displaying the contents of all those single bit instantiated
RAMs in a waveform viewer as words, rather than so many bits scattered
all over. Or just display the array of enums, much easier. Synopsys
seems to be stuck in this mindset that the only folks doing FPGA design
are just doing ASIC prototypes.
What if Synplicity teamed up with a memory compiler company to infer
RAMs from RTL for ASICs? Maybe then Synopsys would begin to
understand. Even Synopsys DesignWare FIFOs don't use RAMs! Why on
earth would I want a synchronous FIFO, more than two or three words
deep, built out of flops when my FPGA has all that RAM that is more
compact, and faster too?"
- Andy Jones of Lockheed Martin
"We use Synplicity and it works well for us for FPGAs. I would like to
see more elaborate features for setting timing constraints in
Synplicity. At the time we tried FPGA Express was extremely slow
compared to Synplicity."
- Karl Kaiser of Resonext
"No contest, Synplicity gives me the best results."
- Tom Moxon of Moxon Design
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