On 11/20/2012 05:59 PM, Conrad wrote:
@Steven: You have much more experience with ASICs then I do and I appologize for my misunderstanding. I read over the WDC site again and saw that they do in fact offer an '816 FPGA core. So that could work for us, but again its a long way off.
Heh, always bear in mind that I'm a software guy who knows enough about hardware to be dangerous :-). It does make sense that they would have soft-cores for both FPGA and ASIC synthesis - likely at prices intended to keep WDC in business.
You are right that pirating such tools would be completely useless as any products produced with such pirated tools would be forbidden fruit. Either way its all just conjecture right now.
Beyond the obvious illegalities involved, my point was that you wouldn't be able to run them even if you did get your hands on a distribution CD. Every industrial-grade EDA tool I'm aware of uses FlexLM license management. It can be difficult even for those of us on the inside to get the proper incantations and permissions to run the blasted things.
Steve