I was talking to a couple of designers who work on high end ASIC designs and it was interesting that they were saying that they were impressed by the free design tools given away by the likes of xilinx and altera,one was saying that in his opinion XST which is the xilinx tool was going to give the likes of Cadence and synopsis a run for their money, and considering that synopsis costs in the order of £100,000 for a licence for a year that must be a real worry for them.several companies that i am in touch with are all saying the same thing and that is the bottom is going to drop out of the high end synthesis tool market with the introduction of multi million gate FPGAs and tools sets that are able to handle huge designs where startup companies with maybe one or two FPGA designers dont want to pay megabucks for bells and whistles that they are never going to use.