Comment by tardedmeme

These chips scale up into the price range of $100,000 per chip, I'm not kidding. You really want someone to pick your $100k chip instead of Intel's $100k chip. A single high-end deal offsets the entire tool sales over the entire lifetime of Vivado.

It might be excusable that they want to vet their customers receiving the tool chain for the high end chips to avoid leaking trade secrets to Intel, but that isn't excusable for the low end. Someone who starts with your $10 chips is likely to develop brand loyalty and if they need $100k chips later, they'll be more likely to pick your ones.