Calling all FPGA companies in stealth mode...

6/10/2008 2:45 PM EDT

The reason for my mentioning this is that I was just chatting with Kamal Aggarwal from SoftJin. In addition to a variety of design services (such as the design and verification of digital systems, RTL design, high performance FPGA implementation, IP development, etc.), the folks at SoftJin also develop customized EDA tools for their customers.

Of particular interest to me is the fact that they've developed a collection of "building block" tools targeted at programmable logic in the form of FPGAs. These tools include RTL synthesis, a routing engine, static timing analysis, and an automated test and regression environment, all designed from the ground up to (a) target programmable fabric and (b) be customizable.

This latter point is very important. Over the last few years, I've seen a lot of companies come up with some great ideas for new chips, such as arrays of processors or whatever. Many of these companies ended up with working silicon that shows a lot of promise ... but they completely neglected the programming model; that is, how do you actually use these devices. As a result, a lot of these companies ended up disappearing without trace.

And the thing is I sort of understand how this comes about. If you have a great idea for a new chip architecture, you want to focus on the fun stuff like defining and creating the chip fabric ... creating a software tool suite ends up on the back-burner ... until it's too late.

One solution, of course, would be to contact SoftJin, because they already have the core tools poised for action, needing only to be fine-tuned for your fabric. As Kamal told me, SoftJin's problem is that they don't know all of the companies out there that are still working in stealth mode because, by definition, those companies have not yet told anyone they are there.

So... if you are currently working on a new programmable chip architecture and you haven't really gotten around to putting serious effort into the tools, you might want to touch based with SoftJin and save yourself a lot of headaches. Feel free to email Kamal at kamal@softjin.com (if you do so, please tell him "Max says Hi" :-)

Questions? Comments? Feel free to email me – Clive "Max" Maxfield – at max@techbites.com). And, of course, if you haven't already done so, don't forget to Sign Up for our weekly Programmable Logic DesignLine Newsletter.