FPGAs was USB Universal Floppy Disk controller

[Scott Stevens]

On Wed, 16 Mar 2005 17:37:49 -0800
"Michael Holley" <swtpc6800 at comcast.net> wrote:

> 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) 
> 

Agreed, but they'd have to operate for centuries to put in 'hundreds of
thousands of man years' or hire a heck of a big development staff.