[HN Gopher] Interview with Jim Anderson, CEO of Lattice Semicond...
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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!
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(page generated 2021-08-23 23:00 UTC)