another FPGA/asic vendor dead :(

NEWS: LeopardLogic has ceased operations. It wasnt directly FPGA but rather asic with part of it as configurable fpga fabric.

Cypress is also out of PLD business silently, well that was to be expected.

humm, who is next?

antti

Reply to
Antti Lukats
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Yes, but ST has entered the fray, with new partial FPGA offerings, that seem well thought out. I did smile when I read one press release, that said they have two versions of their eval boards, one that allowed an external FPGA to develop, and then use their internal one. A good idea, and usefull to the developer, but perhaps more indicative of a Tool Flow that's just a little green, perhaps ? Those issues improve over time.

-jg

Reply to
Jim Granville

hum, where did you find this? i am also looking at STW22000 news all the time, but its seems kinda vaporware or at least not obtainable ?

antti

Reply to
Antti Lukats

Who is in the PLD business these days? Anybody still making 22V10s as compared to CPLDs?

How about smaller parts? Are things like 20R8s pad limited now?

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Reply to
Hal Murray

Yes, Atmel and ICT ( now Anachip ), and also Lattice and in phase-out Cypress. Lattice do an ISP version of the venerable 22V10. We still use 16V8s, which are actually the lowest cost PLDs ( in spite of the marketdroid claims from Altera...)

Nope, they have not changed the die design on the smaller parts in a long time.

To try and cover a little of the SPLD area, Xilinx did add MLF packages to the coolrunner, [ but that is dual-voltage, and low Vcc only, so there are some areas it cannot be applied to].

These pacakges also do not show yet on the Xilinx store....

-jg

Reply to
Jim Granville

Antti, Here is the link

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ST seem to have two branches of ARM+FPGA, this one they call SPEAr, and they claim samples now, Eval PCBs in Dec.... Price of $12/Volume, 200K FPGA, ADC, 3 x HS-USB(!), Ethernet, SDRAM and I think SPI-SerialFlash boot ?

-jg

Reply to
Jim Granville

read carefully - the SPEAr is customized eAsic. the fabric is e-beam programmed.

antti

Reply to
Antti Lukats

Well, seems you are right, but one needs to go three layers down.

The marketdroid that wrote the link above, decided eBEAM might scare off some customers, so better to use words like "configurable logic" & "unprecedented flexibility and time to market".

You have to go deeper into the lower pages, and voila, words like NRE and eBEAM start to appear.

Next questions most customers will ask, is what exaclty is 'low NRE', and what volumes does this approach really kick-in at ?

-jg

Reply to
Jim Granville

The death of Leopard Logic is in line with my estimates on seeing their "product" presentation 2 or 3 years ago. It was impossible to tell whether they were selling

1) FPGAs 2) FPGA IP (as in FPGA fabric for insertion into your ASIC) 3) Design of FPGA fabric service (as in competing with Pilkington, another loser organization)

I don't think they knew either.

Here's my theory (it's "Just a Theory", so you can replace it with anything you like :-)

Philip Says: "FPGAs are such incredibly complex parts to design right, and have such extensive software, support, applications, IP, education, and etc... that unless it is ALL that you do, you will fail"

Your whole company has to be mono-focussed on FPGAs just to survive.

AMD/MMI tried and failed Intel tried and failed Ti tried and failed Motorola tried and failed National Semiconductor tried and failed Toshiba tried and failed NEC tried and failed Plessy tried and failed HP tried and failed ATT tried and failed Philips/Signetics tried and failed Waferscale tried and failed Cypress tried and failed (I wonder who I have forgotten from this list that will be upset?) Atmel tried and hasn't yet failed, but it does not look good.

The above list is of companies that do/did other stuff, and then tried to do FPGAs as well. There are of course a long list of startups that only wanted to do FPGAs, that have either failed, been acquired, or continue to dig through the scraps that Xilinx and Altera and Lattice miss.

When Pasquale Pistorio (ST President and CEO) in January 2004 said that they would be doing FPGA's I had a good laugh

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because My Theory says they will fail.

"The move follows the shut down of an expensive, ill-fated R&D effort aimed at putting ST into the FPGA market."

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When ST announced that they were going to make their tool chain public domain "to encourage research" it certainly did not sound like "Plan A" :-)

So in answer to your question Antti, My Theory says ST will be the next one to pull the plug, or more likely, it will just quietly die away, and you will stop seeing press releases. The products that have FPGA + something else integrated together will be custom type parts (ASIC) that no-one will order.

Just a Theory,

Philip Freidin

Reply to
Philip Freidin

...

Vantis -- bought out by Lattice before their FPGA ever made it to production. (Anyone out there ever get engineering samples?) Vantis did have various useful, inexpensive CPLDs that I designed into several products over time.

Their FPSlic product is unique enough it probably won't die anytime soon. It's kind of a "gentle introduction to SOC design," IMO -- much easier to get into then one of the ARM or PowerPC + massive FPGA offerings.

Ah... so maybe that does cover Vantis?

---Joel

Reply to
Joel Kolstad

Actually, I did not miss Vantis. Vantis is Plan C from the MMI acquired by AMD, merged into AMD PLD Division, spun out as a wholly owned subsiduary so that they could develop a sales force separate from AMD's (so that it would be a more valuable acquisition offering (not much value as an AMD division with no sales force included)), then separated from AMD (no buyer) and on its own for a while, then acquired by Lattice.

The Vantis FPGA was actually that group's second attempt at an FPGA. I believe there was a prior product back when the group was an internal division within AMD.

My lack of enthusiasm for Atmel is based on the functionality of their FPGA offering only. I hope the rest of Atmel does well, but I expect that the FPGA offering, and the derivative products will eventually go by the wayside.

Well, more of an exclusion, since at least for some part of its life Vantis could be considered in the "Startup only doing FPGA/CPLD" category.

Philip

Reply to
Philip Freidin

By the way, am I the only one who finds 90% of the material that companies publish on their products to be utterly content-free and useless?

It seems like the problem is much worse in the FPGA space than other parts of the computing world. That's extremely surprising, especially because the marketing certainly isn't aimed at average end-users.

- a

Reply to
Adam Megacz

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