Re: [oc] [Fwd: Industry Gadfly "VHDL, the new Latin"]

[Holger Baxmann <hbaxmann@mac.com>]

Ohhh, the long awaited silver bullet.
The philoshopher's stone of hardware design.

We already have had some of these:

C is the language of the next 20 years - since the early '70th.
Today has Unix no major conceptual flaws - it will be the operating 
system of the future - since 30 years ago.

SCNR
bax

Am Mittwoch, 09.04.03, um 07:50 Uhr (Europe/Budapest) schrieb Rudolf 
Usselmann:

>
> Thought this might interest you guys and gals !
> VHDL is out !
>
> Regards,
> rudi
> ------------------------------------------------
> www.asics.ws   - Solutions for your ASIC needs -
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>
>
> -----Forwarded Message-----
>
> From:  John Cooley  <jcooley@TheWorld.com>
> Subject: Industry Gadfly  "VHDL, the new Latin"
> Date: 09 Apr 2003 00:38:36 -0400
>
>
>     !!!     "It's not a BUG,                         
> jcooley@TheWorld.com
>    /o o\  /  it's a FEATURE!"                              (508) 
> 429-4357
>   (  >  )
>    \ - /         INDUSTRY GADFLY: "VHDL, the new Latin"
>    _] [_
>                    by John Cooley, EE Times Columnist
>
>       Holliston Poor Farm, P.O. Box 6222, Holliston, MA  01746-6222
>
> When Synopsys CEO Aart De Geus stood up to give his key-note address at
> DVcon'03, nobody expected him to say anything controversial.  It's not
> his style.  So when he gave a talk on the history of the productivity 
> gap
> in EDA for the past 20 years, we all thought that everything was 
> normal.
>
> But subtly, during that talk, Aart put up three slides that showed 
> Verilog
> and VHDL as being what's here now, with only System Verilog being in 
> the
> future.  His final slide had an overlay stating that System Verilog is
> 100 percent backward-compatible with Verilog and that it thus will 
> succeed
> because it will let you keep all your old Verilog legacy code.  Aart 
> closed
> his speech by stating that Synopsys is committed to developing System
> Verilog synthesis, simulation and analysis tools.
>
> It was as if a smart bomb had hit the room.  The trade press and Wall 
> Street
> weenies considered the comments no more than a pitch for System 
> Verilog.
> But my fellow chip designers clearly saw the writing that Aart had put 
> up on
> the wall.  Verilog and VHDL may be here now, but in the future only a 
> flavor
> of Verilog will be left.
>
> "I think Aart just said that VHDL is dead," Cliff Cummings of Sunburst
> Designs, said to me in the awkward 30 seconds that followed Aart's 
> speech.
> "At least, that's what I think he said."  Consultant Stu Sutherland 
> agreed
> with Cliff.  "He said VHDL has no future.  That sounds pretty dead to 
> me."
> Then Dan Joyce and two of his co-workers from Hewlett-Packard walked 
> up and
> asked if Aart had just agreed with Joe.  (Back in the 1995 OVI 
> conference
> keynote address, Joe Costello, then the CEO of Cadence, had said that 
> "VHDL
> was a $400 million mistake.")
>
> In the confusion, I got picked to approach Aart and ask him exactly 
> what
> he was saying about VHDL.
>
> Aart replied that his R&D group wasn't developing any new VHDL-based 
> tools,
> but he also said it will take years to phase out VHDL because leaving
> customers in the lurch would be bad form.  In short, he wasn't 
> abandoning
> VHDL as much as promoting System Verilog.  "This is a big statement.  
> We are
> putting the Synopsys weight behind this language for RTL plus design," 
> said
> Aart.  "I do believe in the long term, though, that System Verilog 
> will be
> the dominant language."
>
> So after years of the Verilog vs. VHDL wars, in one speech, Aart had 
> kicked
> VHDL out of the big-money ASIC flows.  And VHDL was now the new Latin; 
> a
> dead language supported only by a few obscure holdouts in the 
> small-money
> FPGA world.  Verilog (err -- make that a beefed-up Verilog) had won.
>
> -----
>
>     John Cooley runs the E-mail Synopsys Users Group (ESNUG), is a
>     contract ASIC designer, and loves hearing from engineers at
>     "jcooley@TheWorld.com" or (508) 429-4357.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
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>
>
Holger Baxmann - bitwind e.K.
  41539 Dormagen/NRW/Germany
      Vom-Stein-Str. 29
       +49 2133 537747

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