FPGAs was USB Universal Floppy Disk controller

[Michael Holley]

Eric wrote:
> However, I don't *really* think you want to spend the rest of your
> life writing your own FPGA development software.  It's a hard problem
> and there are hundreds of thousands of man-years of development effort
> in the Xilinx software.  By the time you got your own software working
> for one family, that family would have long since been discontinued.

Scott wrote:
> I would suspect that while there might be hundreds of thousands of man
> hours, that there just can't possible be hundreds of thousands of man
> *years* involved.

Xilinx is putting in hundreds of man years this year alone.  They have been 
at it for over 20 years so their development software amounts to 1000s of 
man years of work.  (I was in the PLD/FPGA software development business 
from 1982 to 1997.)
>From the Xilinx Web page
http://www.xilinx.com/company/press/grounder.htm

Headquartered in San Jose, California, Xilinx is a publicly traded company 
(NASDAQ: XLNX) with approximately 2,600 employees, with nearly half of its 
engineers dedicated to software development.

Michael Holley
(Sorry about the last blank message)