17 Mar
2005
17 Mar
'05
8:54 p.m.
On Wed, 16 Mar 2005 17:37:49 -0800
"Michael Holley" <swtpc6800 at comcast.net> wrote:
Eric wrote:
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.
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)