OK, assume I'm a helpless manager droid and take pity on me.
We have some old Xilinx designs that were done under Foundation, so we have one PC that has Foundation installed, and we do occasional tweaks on it. We used schematic entry, so it's inconvenient to move these designs to ISE; let's not debate that here.
So we just got a letter from Xilinx, telling us our ISE version "Base X" is being discontinued and will now be called "Foundation", which is confusing as all get-out. And the annual fee will jump from $1495 to $2495, presumably because people are buying too many Xilinx chips and they find that to be annoying.
But the same letter says that WebPack 8.1i is free with "no loss of device support or design tools."
Q: Is that true?
Q: is WebPack something we can download and keep, or is it some sort of java thing that Xilinx can change or kill at any time? Longterm ability to maintain designs is crucial to us.
Q: why would anybody pay $2500 a year if the free version is the same?
Thanks,
John