[littlecranky67]

FPGAs are mostly used for small series and custom hardware. If you add the software price to the FPGA unit price, it becomes more expensive if you buy, lets say, 1000 FPGAs to ship in your product. Even though you might only license the software once.

It is a trade off, and I have no idea about the state and quality of Vivado. Back in the day I was tinkering with FPGAs, the Xilinx software stack was horrible.

[thayne]

But on the flip side, someone who buys say 50, might not buy your product at all if they have to also buy some expensive software in order to use it.

[f1shy]

Still is. I think got a tiny little bit better, but sucks.

[littlecranky67]

Which is a pro-argument for the licensing change - maybe if they can make it a revenue stream, quality can improve. Back at Uni when we tinkered with FPGA in a lab course I was excited about the topic of reconfigurable computing, but I got mostly repelled by the bad state and quality of the dev tools and I (and some other students) did decide not to persue that field further. They lost some potential clients that year early on.