Zero ASIC releases Wildebeest, the highest performance FPGA synthesis tool

Summary

Cambridge, MA – September 17, 2025 – Zero ASIC, a U.S. semiconductor startup on a mission to democratize silicon, today announced the release of WildebeestTM, the world’s highest performance FPGA synthesis tool. Background The software world has largely moved away from proprietary, vendor-locked compilers in favor of open source alternatives such as LLVM1 and GCC. Early on, these open source compilers lagged behind in performance, but over time, through the collective effort of the community, they caught up and even surpassed their proprietary counterparts. In hardware, a similar transformation has been unfolding. Thanks to the pioneering work of Alan Mishchenko (ABC2), Claire Xenia Wolf (Yosys3), and the broader open source EDA community, FPGA developers have had access to a full-featured Verilog RTL synthesis toolchain for years. Recently, SystemVerilog support has since been added through Mike Popoloski’s excellent Slang parser4. Thanks to strong community involvement, the Yosys project now supports FPGA synthesis for a number of commercial and academic FPGA architectures. Unfortunately, funding for open source FPGA synthesis has been minimal, and as a result a large QoR gap between open source and proprietary synthesis remains. Industrial users, who care obsessively about performance, have thus been stuck between a rock and a hard place: “Freedom or Performance”. AttributeVendor ToolYosysFPGA SupportYesNoLock-inYesNoOpen SourceNoYesFreeYes/NoYesBinary SizeLargeSmallQoRGreatGoodRobustnessGreatGood Wildebeest Intro Wildebeest introduces a number of critical optimization techniques to open source. Some of these techniques are standard practice in commercial compilers, but this is the first time they have been demonstrated in an open source FPGA synthesis tool. The most important Wildebeest strategy is the use of circuit size as a primary feature for selecting the synthesis algorithms. Existing single script solutions don’t work well because they either fail to conv...