[harnhua]

Hmm... seems true, for example, in Japan we found that inter-company relationships also matter a lot in FPGA decisions. Scalable support, alas, would be hard for a startup like us to provide.

We are working on adding dev kit details for hobbyists though. That's something which seems useful, like what you said.

So it seems like convenience rather than chip selection is something that we can possibly get people to pay for? Specifically the convenience of exploring different technical options in an automated design space exploration kind of fashion.

It seems like we have features that people might like, but we have to position it in ways different to what we currently believe would work?

Our webapp is pitching a minimalistic way of doing things, in that what the libraries and TCL scripts that you mentioned do, will be done automatically. Hopefully this will highlight the convenience factor more than the "change-in-working-methods" factor.

Testing and verification definitely is a big market. Figuring out the port and sensitivity list in Verilog/VHDL code doesn't seem hard, but coming up with good test vectors automatically sounds pretty daunting (and interesting).