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- Chris is on hotel Wifi, so really he’s talking to Dave on an app via his phone and then recording locally.
- Is there an uncanny valley in hardware?
- Altium bought Octopart and Ciiva.
- Dave predicted that they would in a blog post a few months back when Altium raised more money.
- Another potential acquisition would be Polar Instruments, makers of SI tools.
- Gowin is a company out of China manufacturing FPGAs. They are partnering with Synopsis (makers of Synplify Pro).
- Chris is intimidated by tcl scripts.
- Synplify Pro was also used as part of the Actel / Microsemi tool chain.
- Chris thinks this is similar to the ESP8266 as it opens up the marketplace for more
- How much use will there be for FPGAs past eduction for most users? Jack Gassett was on Embedded.fm talking about eduction.
- The PSOC family is interesting and has some reconfigurable logic.
- Adafruit hit $33 million and did so by bootstrapping.
- Tim Ferriss had the founder of Evernote on his show who was talking about the Dunbar number (NOT Godwin’s Law)
- Silicon valley perks have started to make their way into non SV companies.
- Timesheets are evil, especially when you’re socially pressured to up your hours per week.
- Dave’s past company was doing production in china and spent $10K on internet access over a phone. The cost of doing business.
Thanks to Pictures of Money for the money jar picture.
Hey, guys! Thanks for making great shows to listen to!
RE: whether engineers would use a startup FPGA in a design. Could you two try to make your points, and then when you don’t agree move on to a new topic? It seems like you keep trying to convince the other when there’s no chance and the argument drags on beyond the interesting point.
No one will ever use ARM CPUs from Allwinner, MediaTek, Rockchip etc., at least if it were for Dave’s argument re new FPGA entrants. If the price is right names don’t matter.
As for FPGA in consumer electronics, Lattice had the iCE40 in a few Samsung Galaxy phones and tablets (acquired through Blue Silicon, another newcomer that no one would ever use). Though to Dave’s point, that socket did go away within a generation or two, absorbed into some bigger custom silicon.
I think Dave is missing the point about the Chinese FPGA. Sure, nobody in the West in their right minds is going to use it, but then I suspect many companies within China will be told to use it, whether they want to or not. That’s how it works there. If they want state support, and all that brings, then they do what the state tells them. They probably won’t be overly worried about things like competitor patents, copyrights etc either. Overall the point is to keep the money inside China.
I wonder how long it will be before Limor and Phil at Adafruit sell up for a few hundred million bucks.
Great show notes! The Tim Ferris / Phil Libin podcast was a good one.. although it cost me $4 (I had to rent the World Of Tomorrow documentary that they mentioned 🙂
BTW, there’s a relatively inexpensive Cypress PSoC4 kit for BLDC motor control, that might be worth checking out (CY8CKIT-037 Motor/Driver + CY8CKIT-042 pioneer kit).
Regarding Dave’s youtube advertising revenue, and his new store, Jack Ganssle posted a great (and positive) review of the uCurrent.. hopefully there was a bump in business!
embedded dot com/electronics-blogs/break-points/4440109/Real-Time-Current-Monitor-Rev-2
You guys mentioned that the fpga tool flow is the most complicated – The ASIC tool flow is an order of magnitude more complex because it uses the same or similar tools plus many many others!
Great show. Needs more Jeff Keyser!