[boot]

Aside from the business cycle reasons - Being a young chip designer, I'm severely disappointed in the hardware engineering culture. It is too hard to get ideas through anyone who is over 35 years old. Everyone thinks Perl is really great and Verilog is good enough. Even though both suck.

Basically, the older generation has killed the industry. Much like they did to aerospace.

The HW engineering firms should be leveraging SW open source projects and adapt them as needed. For example, why have an in-house Perl scripting framework on top of Verilog. Use Django or something similar instead.

The industry is too risk averse and overall poised.

[bjpcjp]

As an ex-program manager on major chip projects, I would be astonished if open-source alternatives exist for major design tools. GMs can complain all they want about seat license costs, but they will stick with a proven tool until somebody proves they can meet the same quality metrics.

[boot]

That is what I'm complaining about. HW engineers are excellent at hardware concepts. Terrible at other trends.

Why did IBM give the operating system business to Microsoft? An attitude problem. Why is HW consistently a shrinking industry? An Attitude problem. Open source nothing. Keep using the same technology as 1980.

"Oh, what the hell, our salaries are going down?" "We can't keep up with project schedule because we're using the same concepts as we did on exponentially less complex chips 20 years ago? It's not our fault."

It's an attitude problem. HW isn't the big brother it used to be. It's the little brother. It needs to look at what big brother software is doing to be so successful. And copy it. Open source tools/languages. Leverage existing software projects instead of inventing our own everything. Companies need to sponsor these tools/give-back to these projects.

Stuck with (System) Verilog? Fine. What would software do. Create a framework on top of old technology (HTML/Verilog) to make it less painful (like Rails). Create a language that interacts well with the old language (Java/JVM/Scala/Closure).

Down vote me all you want for my surliness. It's true.