Re: why so many problems Xilinx ?

embarrassing...

Often vendors don't want to seem like they are hawking their wares here. So I see nothing wrong with contact on a more personal level in order to get a good answer to a question. When your sales people make calls on customers, they don't invite the competition to come along do they? Support is no different. Why should the open the door for kibitzing from the competition? And maybe they will be revealing some information that they don't want the competition to have. I know that Xilinx has been pretty tightlipped about their product schedules. At least I have had a very hard time getting that info until a couple of weeks ago when I insisted that I needed it on the Spartan 3s.

It's like sex - can be embarrassing at first for the strongest soul, but once you get the habit... Someone at Altera should take a vow to answer _every_ question for, say, a week. We will all applaud.

To paraphase Blackadder on airplanes: "I treat my Usenet questions like I treat my women. Climb aboard twice a day and fly them up to heaven."

embarrassing...

Embarrassment has nothing to do with it. I personally think that this newsgroup is the wrong place to attack the competitor's products -- in general, I think both X & A are pretty well behaved, pointing out our strong points instead of directly pointing out weaknesses in our competitor's products. In a personal email, there is much more freedom to say what I feel like and to venture off into opinion from fact. Plus, if I'm not 100% sure, I can just say so and follow-up later when I find out the full answer; in the newsgroup, you can look pretty silly when you do so (speaking from experience...).

Most of us who post here from Altera are in the R&D side of the company, so we're usually unaware of product positioning or the "company line" on certain issues. When in doubt, I rather just reply offline while I wait for a response from the apps folks.

Regards,

Paul

I too have been contacted thru email everytime that my Altera ng questions were not replied to in the group. Altera seemed to put alot of thought into the answers. It would be nice if they replied to the group to share the knowledge, except that maybe my questions were too specific to be helpful to others.

-- Pete

I can guarantee you that neither Xilinx nor Altera harbors this kind of girlish modesty. But we must consider the audience, and avoid the BS.

I definitely will hawk the capabilities of the Virtex-II DCM and MGTs if anybody ever asks for a related functionality. That's my job, and that's what this ng is for, isn't it? Peter Alfke

Consider posting any solution that is useful to you. I may be googling for it next week.

-- Mike Treseler

I don't really care how I get help. When I have a question, I just want an answer. If they are more comfortable with email than the newsgroup, I don't care. Anything is better than the hotline or god forbid.. the web site!

But I guess I should say that an open discussion here was what alerted me to the modular configuration capability of ISE. I have checked this out on the web site several times and pretty much found nothing. But now I have at least one app note about how to use it and this will make a very big difference in my device selection. However I expect this will require a lot of support since it seems a bit more complex than the app note covers. Can you recommend a point of contact for modular configuration? This is exactly the sort of thing I expect will be like pulling teeth to get any real info on from the hotline.

It depends on how well your design fits into physical modules. Some designs are certainly more complicated than what's described in the App Note.

Yes, I will check with a couple of our modular design experts and get you a name.

Steve