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Amphion is Northern Ireland Company specialized in video/audio compression IP product (like MPEG coder/decoder).
We had extremely bad experience with them, and I don’t recommend any cooperation with this company or using of their product for anything.
As an IP company, instead to verify their product for all possible usage and purpose, they fail to verify it even for primary target of their design. Also they have: terrible coding style in both RTL and firmware, lack of any useful documentation, university-like approach to problem solving, not enough people which work on their cores, …
to andromeda:
what do you mean by "university-like approach on solving problems" for the Amphion company? Do you mean that the product was not verified to the extent and for all the corner cases needed?
Also, they claim that they deliver "Firm IP" which as i think is:
a. RTL for the components that the standard module generator of your synthesis tool would optimize in acceptable way. E.g. FSM control logic, distributed registers, pipeline registers, and generally random logic.
b. Technology-specific code for the components that should reach optimal performance. That is all memories, as well as adders, multipliers etc.
They can't be total failure so what is the specific (please be as specific as you can) problem you had?
OK they are not total failure, I agree.
In general, they are founded from University, and have solid theoretical knowledge but not enough implementation experience.
Lets say that I could forget various stupidities in their RTL, like:
- non-synthesisable code (when have you see flop with more then 1 clock last time
- code which lead to simulation-synthesis missmatches
- using of priority coders when this have no sence
and much more ...
But still, when you develop IP product, you need to verify your IP much more then when you design something which will fit into 1 specific design.
I don't want to tell how many ECOs we have inside of their core (which is suposed to be finnished few months before). And only few of them were related to customization of their IP to our design.
Also, on software side, we complettely rewrite their code.
At the end design worked, but when you analyze which price you really paid for this IP (in engeneer-hours spent in debugging of IP!!!!), it is not nice.
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