Interview with Jim Anderson, CEO of Lattice Semiconductor
1–10 of 52 posts
Re: Interview with Jim Anderson, CEO of Lattice Semiconductor
#2> ... 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.
Re: Interview with Jim Anderson, CEO of Lattice Semiconductor
#3> ... 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 woul…
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.
Re: Interview with Jim Anderson, CEO of Lattice Semiconductor
#4> ... 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 woul…
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.
> The secret sauce is in the software.
I'll take my hardware without the sauce, thank you!
Re: Interview with Jim Anderson, CEO of Lattice Semiconductor
#5> ... 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 woul…
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.
Re: Interview with Jim Anderson, CEO of Lattice Semiconductor
#6Video 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.
Re: Interview with Jim Anderson, CEO of Lattice Semiconductor
#7> ... 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 woul…
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.
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.
Re: Interview with Jim Anderson, CEO of Lattice Semiconductor
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
There are various efforts in this area, e.g. see https://osfpga.org/, https://openfpga.readthedocs.io/ etc.
Re: Interview with Jim Anderson, CEO of Lattice Semiconductor
#9Video 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.
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!
Re: Interview with Jim Anderson, CEO of Lattice Semiconductor
#10> ... 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 woul…
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.
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.