On Thu, 27 Oct 2005 19:01:13 -0700, "Joel
Kolstad" <J...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>"Philip Freidin" <p...@fliptronics.com> wrote
>> Your whole company has to be mono-focussed on FPGAs just to survive.
>> AMD/MMI tried and failed
>> Intel tried and failed
>...
>> (I wonder who I have forgotten from this list that will be upset?)
>
>Vantis -- bought out by Lattice before their FPGA ever made it to production. 
>(Anyone out there ever get engineering samples?)  Vantis did have various 
>useful, inexpensive CPLDs that I designed into several products over time.

Actually, I did not miss Vantis. Vantis is Plan C from the MMI acquired by
AMD, merged into AMD PLD Division, spun out as a wholly owned subsiduary so
that they could develop a sales force separate from AMD's (so that it would
be a more valuable acquisition offering (not much value as an AMD division
with no sales force included)), then separated from AMD (no buyer) and on its
own for a while, then acquired by Lattice.

The Vantis FPGA was actually that group's second attempt at an FPGA. I
believe there was a prior product back when the group was an internal
division within AMD.

>> Atmel tried and hasn't yet failed, but it does not look good.
>
>Their FPSlic product is unique enough it probably won't die anytime soon. 
>It's kind of a "gentle introduction to SOC design," IMO -- much easier to
get 
>into then one of the ARM or PowerPC + massive FPGA offerings.

My lack of enthusiasm for Atmel is based on the functionality of their
FPGA offering only. I hope the rest of Atmel does well, but I expect
that the FPGA offering, and the derivative products will eventually
go by the wayside.

>> The above list is of companies that do/did other stuff, and then
>> tried to do FPGAs as well.
>
>Ah... so maybe that does cover Vantis?

Well, more of an exclusion, since at least for some part of its life
Vantis could be considered in the "Startup only doing FPGA/CPLD"
category.

Philip

Jim Granville <n...@designtools.co.nz> writes:
> The marketdroid that wrote the link above, decided eBEAM
> might scare off some customers, so better to use words
> like "configurable logic" & "unprecedented flexibility and time to
market".

By the way, am I the only one who finds 90% of the material that
companies publish on their products to be utterly content-free and
useless?

It seems like the problem is much worse in the FPGA space than other
parts of the computing world.  That's extremely surprising, especially
because the marketing certainly isn't aimed at average end-users.

  - a