FPGA VAX update

I reverse engineered some Altera PLDs (EP600 and EP900) around 1990 and that took a few weeks. I knew some folks at NeoCad that reverse engineered the Xilinx family and made better design tools than Xilinx. They got no help at all from Xilinx. After competing with NeoCad for a few years Xilinx bought them in 1995 and used the NeoCad tools. The parts today are much larger than they were in 1995 and it took a large group to reverse engineer the parts then. Another problem is that Xilinx keeps developing new devices so you have a moving target. Xilinx has a free version (ISE WebPACK) that supports the smaller FPGAs on Windows and Red Hat Linux. The scope of the problem and the availability of free software is going to make it difficult to get enough people to tackle the problem. It happened before but they sold out for the big bucks. Michael Holley www.swtpc.com/mholley