[bhb916]

I moved one of our smaller projects over to Altera because they were first to 28nm plus the local Altera team was willing to help out with porting any device-specific code.

I was very disappointed with the tools. It's worth a write-up all on it's own, but my staff struggled through the tooling which consumed most of their time.

[alok-g]

Just asking, not questioning: Are you sure they would not have similarly struggled if they were pros in Altera and were moving to Xilinx? An issue with counter-intuitive and buggy tools is exactly that you get used to them, your mind slowly forgets how messy a design the tools have, and now everything else seems counter-intuitive.

[bhb916]

That's a good question. It's almost impossible to tell objectively. I would say that the Altera tools felt more like circa 2007 Xilinx Tools. They lacked quality control AND maturity. This is all very subjective, though.

[djcapelis]

Ugh. I remember 2007 Xilinx tools and I wouldn't wish them on anyone. I was so surprised when I started doing FPGA work again and found even the old ISE versions I'm using (2010/2011-ish) are so much better!

I have access to newer software, but the designs I'm working with don't import correctly into them. :-P