Just look, for instance, at FPGAs: almost all the tooling is proprietary, very expensive, and very buggy too. Or look at PCB design: Altium seems to be the standard here still, despite Kicad having made huge advances and by most accounts being as good or even better. It took decades (Kicad started in 1992) for the FOSS alternatives here to really catch on much, and only really because PCBs became cheap enough for hobbyists to design and construct their own (mainly because of Chinese PCB companies), and because CERN contributed some resources.
I'm not sure what the deal is with engineers hating collaboratively-developed and freely-available software, but it's a real thing in my experience. It's like someone told them that FOSS is "socialism" and they just reflexively dismiss or hate it.
Apple and NVIDIA are using Allegro (or customized versions thereof.)
> or even better
KiCad is faster, absolutely not better.
> very expensive
Vivado is free for a great number of devices (not just the "lite" version, either, depending on the board - U50, U55, etc.)
No open source tooling can even remotely compare in ASIC implementation flow or FPGA implementation.
That seems like a matter of taste. We switched from Altium to KiCad and I very much prefer it. We don't do any RF stuff, so there might be things that don't quite work in KiCad, but for what we do - power electronics - it works perfectly well.
Not what I've heard, and CERN seems to think it's good enough for their particle colliders.
>No open source tooling can even remotely compare in ASIC implementation flow or FPGA implementation.
Yes, FPGA tools are a very different matter. I do wonder if this is really lock-in from vendors more than any preference by users, but still, sufficiently motivated users could reverse-engineer things to try to make a single open-source toolset that works with all vendors' FPGAs. Of course, the feasibility of this is questionable, but we've seen really impressive reverse-engineering efforts in other places in FOSS. Just look at how futile it is for YouTube to try to prevent people from downloading their videos.
https://www.eenewseurope.com/en/cern-selects-cadence-service...
"The CERN physics department is deploying the Cadence analog and digital end-to-end solutions as well as the Cadence verification and Allegro PCB solutions throughout the support of its CERN IT department."
They also have a service contract with KiCad Services Corporation. [2]
[1] https://ohwr.org/project/macbeth [2] https://cernandsocietyfoundation.cern/news/significant-miles...