"I've been using Target Compiler's tools to develop custom application specific cores for almost 5 years. I consider them to be a mature tool now. We have 4 custom processors in production. All the processors I've made with it have been first time right.
The speed at which we can turn out a custom core using their toolset, and with only 2 engineers (one writing nML/RTL and the other verifying), still astonishes me. When writing your nML, their Chess/Checkers tool set does so many checks that if it compiles, it is generally working. The tools also point out places to optimize your nML, instruction encoding, pipelining, etc...
Their tool support is the best I've ever dealt with. Even as they've reached more users, the support has not suffered. Any issues with a tool release we've ever had has been solved within a day. On all our processor projects, we've taken someone new to Target, ramped them up on Chess/Checkers and released a first version of the processor running on an FPGA in less than 6 months. The processor development has not been the critical path on any of the ASICs that were released. I believe that this can be attributed to Target Compiler's excellent tool suite."
Benton Watson
Gennum Corporation
Ottawa, Canada