[HN Gopher] Interview with Jim Anderson, CEO of Lattice Semicond... ___________________________________________________________________ Interview with Jim Anderson, CEO of Lattice Semiconductor Author : rbanffy Score : 73 points Date : 2021-08-23 10:34 UTC (12 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.anandtech.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.anandtech.com) | nixpulvis wrote: | Seems like Anandtech needs to hire a few editors. | DoingIsLearning wrote: | > ... we built out a pretty significant portfolio of these | applications solutions and they make it very easy for the | customer to adopt our devices into their systems... | | Very disappointing that on the topic of Software/Toolchain it's | more of the same business decisions of just copying the | Xilinx/Altera paradigm. | | Since they seemed rather non-agressive towards Yosys/SymbiFlow | they made me quite hopeful that Lattice would be the fpga players | that would kickstart open-source toolchain. | | I am tired of being forced to use software that vendors treat as | a cost centre. I want to buy your hardware, I want the people | that I work with to buy your hw. | | I am tired of vendors forcing a graphical programing toolchain | that hides complexity behind half baked software. And judging | from the Altera/Xilinx forums I know I cannot be alone in this. | MisterTea wrote: | I had fun years ago with FPGA's, first on a digilent nexus 3 | and then a terasic de0 nano. I kinda gave up as the IDE's | sucked and sucked harder if you were on anything other than | windows. I spent hours getting Quartus running on Ubuntu, | something to do with the draconian licensing software. I also | had issues with ISE on Linux and never bothered to move on to | Vivaldo for the same reason, didn't want the headache. | | Open your stupid bitstream formats FFS. | fleventynine wrote: | If we could get similar momentum we have with gcc and LLVM | behind projects like yosys and nextpnr, FPGAs would be much | more useful and likely be a larger market overall. | | I'm willing to personally donate 10k a year to projects like | these to liberate myself from crappy vendor tools that I can't | improve. | HansHamster wrote: | And what really annoys me about Lattice in particular is that | they shut down their community forum and now there is | basically no way to get any form of support when using a free | license. | | A while ago I found a bug in Lattice Radiant that produced | broken PLL configurations. I reproduced this and confirmed | that it doesn't happen in their iCECube software, but had no | desire to argue with their support about why they should even | look at it when I'm not paying $$$ for the software... | | I permanently switched to the open toolchain and never had | any serious issues since... | UncleOxidant wrote: | I guess I'm not seeing from that quote how they're anti- | Yosys/SymbiFlow. Are you saying that they just aren't as | helpful towards the open source FPGA tools as they could be? | Lattice still seems to be more open towards these kinds of open | source tools than Xilinx/Altera by far. Yes, Lattice should | probably be more proactive in actually working with the open | source developers, but baby steps, I guess. | deelowe wrote: | The secret sauce is in the software. The hardware isn't that | revolutionary. On top of that, fpga vendors have this habit of | outsourcing every little thing. This makes it super difficult | for them to embrace open source give the IP liabilities. | amelius wrote: | > The secret sauce is in the software. | | I'll take my hardware without the sauce, thank you! | liaukovv wrote: | That would make hardware a commodity and there is not | enough margin in commodoties. | ohazi wrote: | The secret sauce may be in the software, but the software | they sell you is a 1998 edition of Borland C++, and we're all | screaming at them to please just make their hardware an LLVM | target already. | rowanG077 wrote: | I see an open source tool chain but not an open source FPGA. | Doesn't that by itself prove the secret sauce is not that | secret. | nereye wrote: | There are various efforts in this area, e.g. see | https://osfpga.org/, https://openfpga.readthedocs.io/ etc. | akelly wrote: | Video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDNtcBh-3o0 | | It's a decent overview of Lattice's business and some of their | applications. Nothing too technical. A shame Ian didn't ask about | open source toolchains. | pininja wrote: | I started watching Ian this year and have really enjoyed his | reporting. I would like to learn more about how he learned this | complicated industry... he's so knowledgeable! | rowanG077 wrote: | Basically just a marketing fluff interview. Would love to see | lattice ditch their shitty tooling and dedicate time to | developing yosys and nextpnr. Nextpnr especially misses crucial | features. | cushychicken wrote: | I was surprised to hear lotsa talk about FPGAs and basically | nothing about HDMI or silicon video tech. | | Turns out Lattice bought Silicon Image in 2015, then turned | around and sold off the HDMI portion of the business to another | company I've never heard of, which was _again_ sold - to Analog | Devices. | | Huh. Silly me for not paying attention. | frank0631 wrote: | I like the direction Lattice is going. The bigger FPGA developers | Xilinx and Intel are going for bigger, denser, faster, more | ultra-ram, and as many LUTs as the chip can handle; Lattice is | going for smaller, cheaper, and more accessible. I'm very | surprised to hear they're going after low power edge AI, but it's | niche markets like that where FPGAs shine! ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-08-23 23:00 UTC)