Anybody can make silicon, does the manufacturer have a free, competent, toolchain? That would be my primary concern. As I said, anybody can make silicon.
That was my second thought (after "wow, are they still around").
I use FPGAs of this kind of size all the time, so a new vendor is genuinely interesting to me provided there are no major costs or technical hurdles in the way. Unfortunately it's quite apparent that they don't have the tool chain support in place - instead they say "design conversion free of charge for GateMateTM customers", and "Typically, a software framework for FPGA design is already installed at the customer side".
Well, yes, there is... Quartus, in my case, though I strongly suspect they're thinking of companies who have already paid out for Synplify - which, I presume, doesn't have a condition in the licence explicitly forbidding the user from targeting devices not made by the tool chain vendor.,
Clearly the use case for which these parts have been developed is along the lines of:
- design FPGA using Intel or Xilinx
- discover that, for legal or commercial reasons, continuing to buy parts from those companies is no longer possible or strategically advantageous
- convert existing, known working design to use a part from a European supplier
-
![Huh? ???](https://www.eevblog.com/forum/Smileys/default/xhuh.gif.pagespeed.ic.6Nvt7O8a11.png)
- keep manufacturing product
I'd be interested to hear from any engineers who use these devices out of choice, and not as a result of being told that they must use them because <commercial reason>.
Maybe I'll give them a call anyway, it could be interesting to see how they respond to "here's my VHDL, tell me how to make it work on your eval board".