Discontinued IC's

William Donzelli wrote: Well, sort of. Back-annotation is rampant at clock speeds above 150MHz in both VHDL and Verilog, and you can't build a processor (or something that looks like a processor) these days without using custom cells, i.e., non-synthesized hunks of code which describe the circuit at the transistor level. Purely behavioral code is rarely seen these days and is often avoided by policy -- it's possible to write perfectly valid behavioral code which is utterly unsynthisizable -- all of which makes me wonder how this addresses the concern (if it _is_ a concern). As for the military -- while the US military loves VHDL (as do most European firms) most US firms prefer Verilog (IBM is a notable exception) and with the push towards COTS or repackaged COTS components the Pentagon is in no position to tell people to write stuff in VHDL. Stuff gets obsoleted so fast that the US is busy either preparing to field (the F22) or compete (the JSF) aircraft which contain discontinued parts in their avionics systems. They don't fix this by requiring people to write stuff in VHDL, they fix it by buying shitloads of parts while they can and then sticking them on the shelf. There's also the weird secondary market that exists because of military programs. TI has previously sold the IP and remaining dies for end-of-life parts to other firms who then either continue production or package the dies to meet military needs -- which is great if you need something in a flat-pac... -- Chris Kennedy chris(a)mainecoon.com http://www.mainecoon.com PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97