News of Tabula's closure was naturally a big thing to people in the industry.
For years, Tabula had been the shiny, young FPGA company with lots of talent and funding. Not that Tabula stayed a startup for long, given the considerable resources that it amassed.
Many former colleagues had gone over to Tabula over the years, and probably a lot of engineering and managerial talent from every FPGA company as well. I didn't know any of the executives, but whenever I popped by to catch up with old friends, certainly measured optimism was always in the air.
The FPGAs they had developed seemed revolutionary and promised much in terms of innovation and performance improvements. The device architecture was exciting and against a backdrop of waning semiconductor hardware startup activities, Tabula was a welcome ray of hope, a daring adventure.
The Stylus software sounded every bit as challenging and fun to implement - for example, I've always been intrigued by how one can debug something running in four-dimensional space.
FPGA customers are a passionate, demanding group of people who want good software, hardware, IP and support. Evaluation boards, reference designs and application notes are just some of the things that designers look for to be persuaded of a particular FPGA device family's benefits. On top of that, the economics have to make sense for the consumer as well as the supplier. For a younger FPGA vendor, creating all that from scratch and competing with established vendors could not have been an easy task.
Tabula fought the good fight - we salute you.