When Invaluable Kills Business

By SemiWiki

December 11, 2017

Productivity is notoriously hard to sell. I recently visited a company where the engineering team wanted to evaluate one of our FPGA debug and analysis products on an existing board. This board had an FPGA that we supported and had all the required connectivity - it could just be used ‘out of the box’. Our tool - Exostiv - involves the insertion of a debug IP in the FPGA. We offered to set up the tool with the engineering team and within 60 minutes, the board was instrumented and ready to use. As I did it by myself, there was no initial setup cost nor learning curve cost in this example.

Well, a good demonstration as it seemed... After 2 hours of discussion and having shown the product's main features, I left the engineering team a unit with a license until the next day.

The next day, the engineering team told me that the tool was easy to use for those used to JTAG-based logic analyzers such as Chipscope / Xilinx logic analyzer. Basically, the flow was identical. Specific items like transceivers configuration required some additional understanding of the parameters, but overall, they said the setup and trial had run pretty smoothly.

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