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Comment by rjzzleep | Hacker News Reader

Probably worry about the future of access and direction for FPGAs. Most acquisitions of FPGA companies resulted in worse products afterwards. I'm probably suffering from confirmation bias here.

Is there any example of a FPGA provider delivering better products after acquisition?

EDIT: I'd wager that if the last administration hadn't blocked the sale of Lattice it would now be dead.

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> Most acquisitions of FPGA companies

> any example of a FPGA provider

Are there lots of FPGA companies that have gotten acquired in the first place? Only Altera comes to my mind.

Atmel had some FPGAs when acquired by Microchip. Albeit Microchip is sort of where chip families go to die, so I wouldn't draw a trend from that.

Would the Xilinx/AMD acquisition make Lattice the biggest independent FPGA vendor?

Many of Lattice's FPGAs were acquisitions as well. The iCE series came from SiliconBlue; ECP5 came from Silicon Image.

Altera and Xilinx are the only two FPGAs out there ;)

lattice?

Uh at the high end there is Achronix and then the lower end you have Microchip(ex Microsemi(ex-Actel) and Lattice, Efinx and there are a couple of Chinese startups.

Actel was acquired by Microsemi that was acquired by Microchip.

In my opinion they have only gotten better. That said - my opinion of Actel was pretty close to the floor.

From my current perspective Actel was ok for its time. I worked with APA150 FPGAs in the past and for that ancient time it was ok. I heard, Microchip has cool SoC with RISC-V nowadays. I just don’t have time to play with them after work.

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