Anyone to open "FPGA museum" ? Here is first item :)

What did the chips & software cost at the time..?

:) nothing / as not in shops...

pretty much ALL electronic components sales at that time was black- market only. And almost all of them was stolen from the military fabs. There was very little in the official shops, the real component market was openly-hidden somewhere close by in big cities Moscow/St. Petersburg. In other places there was possible some "guy" coming each few weeks with "stuff" so you could "pre-order" things from him. Or you could go yourself to the cities where the fabs where and deal there yourself. Funny times.

But when you ask the prices, actually I do recall the pricing, think not much different than now XC2064 around 15 USD I think. I recall it because in one design I used 13 GAL's what was not much more then price of cheapest Xilinx chip and the GAL's where around 1 USD

Antti

You should send the link to Xilinx. Sometimes companies will have a gallery of devices that have used thier products. Having a device with an interesting story like coming form the black market and used in developing rusian spy technology, is just the thing marketing guys like to have to fill time and showusefulness of the devices.

If my friend still worked for Xilinx, I would send the link to her.

I was mostly curious on the western market prices for the XC3030 + software. Not the russian one, which for obvious reasons was not so straightforward as the western one :) Though the history of getting a XC3030 in the 1980s russia is interesting ;)

Antti, this is more or less true, but only from the point of view of an individual willing to do something at home at that time. If electronic design was your full-time job the situation would be quite different, and what was available to you depended on which industry your institution worked for and on some other factors including personal relationships of your bosses, etc... Foreign parts were usually purchased as temporary subs for future functional clones :)

/Mikhail

With all due respect, this is all a pure speculation... Antti doesn't seem to know the real story behind this board...

/Mikhail

Mikhail,

with all due respect, I do.

Antti

Sure there are many points of view a always. Sure the "zhirpotreb" (consumer) versions of the electronics components was possible to buy via official channels. But even so there was quite often a need for special "salesman" that all could trink lots of vodka and use personal contacts to "accelerate". Those salesman did travel the fabs and arranged that some orders did get process more quickly.

But not all components had non-military versions with prefix "K", and those it was more a problem to get them for consumer products. Russian did of clone lots of western components, but sometimes they had very bad yield, at least with components with K prefix. Like the i8275 (Russian version) was hard to get, and had maybe 10% yield of what was sold openly. Original i8275 was also obtainable but for rather high price.

I started with electronic as hobby in 1979 and I had many friends who all wanted to have access to the LATEST and GREATEST of that times, and it usually did take lots of seeking to get hand on them. Not much on normal sales channels. Eh folks its not that different now either, the latest and greatest parts are "early access", under NDA, special customer only.

Antti

XC2064,XC2018,XC3020 was "obtainable" XC3030 also, but I dont recall obtaining or using them

here is an product based on XC3020, broadcast performance teletext inserter card, it was used in 80286 PC at Estonian TV station at some time, also in some cable network senders.

re: XC3K, there was strong rumor that russians intended to clone some XC3K devices I think it was supposed to be done in the Kiev fab. I dont know how far it went but i think they never had any production.

xilinx software and XACT dongle/schematics did arrive the UdSSR countries the same channel as the first XC2K/XC3K chips. XACT 3.2 on floppy disks.

just out of curiosity i looked some more recent news about current products and developments:

5576HS1T clone of Altera EPF10K50, packaged in 256 flat military ceramic 5576HS2T functional clone of EPF8282, with runtime config CRC and RAD HARD improvments

beside them, there are not much known about russian FPGA's, they mostly use BMK's base die with custom single layer metal process

Antti

Yes and no. If you make devices that still need export licenses, it may not be a good idea to have visible displays for the spooks, of how these did get (easily) into the 'wrong' hands :)

-jg

Except for the fact that much of their production is offshore, where export rules do not apply. Somebody in the US would only be liable if there was a verified audit trail that the parts passed thru the US.

Somewhere in my attic I still have a copy of Altera's Sam+Plus and A+Plus SW and manuals. It was so much easier in the DOS days. If synthesis wouldn't get it right, you could go in and set the bits in the JEDEC file and make it work. You could do some really cool stuff that way. I once put a 33 macrocell design in a 32 macrocell part! The Cypress FAE never figured out how I made it work! :-) Ah! the good old days.

Derek Palmer

9 years @ Altera 2 years @ Synopsys (FPGA express) 3 years @ Chameleon Systems (FPGA+Processor) 3 years @ Tensilca (Real configurable processors) 3 years @ Xilinx (doing processor stuff) I'm very FPGA biased.