Highest reader/customer satisfaction with an FPGA vendor’s tools:

Altera for their Quartus II suite of design tools

You told us that Altera has made great strides in its tool suite over the past two years, particularly with the performance and quality of the Quartus II place-and-route tools. They also got high marks from many for their SOPC Builder embedded system tools working with their Nios soft processor core.

Highest reader/customer satisfaction with an FPGA vendor’s support:

Xilinx for their support staff, application engineers, documentation, and website

You told us that Xilinx consistently sets the standard for support staff and resources that understand your problems and their products and go the extra mile to make you successful in your project.

Highest reader/customer satisfaction with an FPGA vendor’s devices:

Lattice Semiconductor for their CPLD devices

You told us that, while CPLD may not be the glamour segment of the programmable logic industry, Lattice devices consistently and reliably deliver the features and performance that the datasheet claims, solving your CPLD problems in a cost-effective, reliable manner.

Highest reader/customer satisfaction with an EDA vendor’s HDL simulator performance, capacity, and reliability:

Mentor Graphics for their ModelSim simulator

You told us that, in addition to being the dominant HDL simulator in the FPGA market, ModelSim delivers best in many of the categories most important to design teams working against a schedule. This was actually three separate categories, and ModelSim swept them all.

Highest reader/customer satisfaction with an EDA vendor’s HDL simulator price/value and ease-of-use:

Aldec for their ActiveHDL simulator

You told us that Aldec’s simulator is extremely approachable and easy to learn. You like Aldec’s whole-solution approach to simulation and debug and their clear focus on FPGA design in particular. You also found Aldec’s tools to be an outstanding value for the price.

Highest reader/customer satisfaction with an EDA vendor’s synthesis tool’s performance, quality of results, reliability, and ease of use:

Synplicity for their Synplify and Synplify-Pro tools

You told us that Synplicity’s products clearly lead the synthesis field for FPGA. Many of you said you were happy to pay the additional cost of Synplicity’s 3 rd party tools over the FPGA vendor-supplied synthesis products in order to get vendor independence, an edge on quality of results, HDL language support, and “blazing fast compile times.”