how much costs the Artix 7 devices?

I got the vaporware ad, too. I checked the franchised distributors, but none of them even acknowledge the existence of Artix-7. My guess is that "shipping" means something different to Xilinx than it does to you and me. Probably they have sampled the parts to some early adopters.

-- Gabor

I forgot to add - the reason why I was looking was to see availability more than pricing. Early pricing is generally different from pricing a year or more into production. I also wanted to know which parts were "shipped." Usually Xilinx starts with a part somewhere in the middle of the density spectrum, but it's not clear where they would start with Artix-7 - perhaps at the high end to try to recover more NRE costs? Most of us interested in low-cost FPGA's are more likely to want the smallest part, which still has 100K "Logic Elements" (multiply LUT's times 1.6 for LE's). And I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for non-BGA packaging in 7-series parts.

-- Gabor

They started putting PRs out about these devices out over 2 years ago.

Don't believe anything Xilinx says until they are in stock.

OK, it took some digging, but I found the press release:

Apparently they are starting with the XC7A100T (smallest device).

-- Gabor

Can you think of a semi vendor for whom that statement _isn't_ true?

--
Rob Gaddi, Highland Technology -- www.highlandtechnology.com
Email address domain is currently out of order.  See above to fix.

Thanks. This was from July 17, 2012: "Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX) today announced first shipments of its Artix?-7 Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) family."

Well, let's take pot luck when they will really ship it to end customers :-)

This would be good for my project. I was asking, because a CPLD is just by a factor of 3 of 4 too small, so any small FPGA device would work. But I guess the new Artix devices would be still more expensive than e.g. the Spartan 3A, which I hope will be produced for some more years.

--
Frank Buss, http://www.frank-buss.de
electronics and more: http://www.youtube.com/user/frankbuss

The 7A100 is *massive* though (some smaller Artix devices got dropped last year IIRC):

• ~100K "logic cells" (63k 6-LUTs, 127k FFs), 240 DSP blocks, nearly 5Mbit Block RAM!

for a small cheap FPGA you still want Spartan 6 - smallest is 6SLX4:

• ~4K "logic cells" (2400 6-LUTs, 4800 FFs), 8 DSP blocks, 216Kb Blockram.

Cheers, Martin

--
martin.j.thompson@trw.com 
TRW Conekt - Consultancy in Engineering, Knowledge and Technology
http://www.conekt.co.uk/capabilities/39-electronic-hardware

year IIRC):

Does anyone (without NDA) knows why the smaller devices got dropped, if there will some smaller devices reappear, and what the costs for "normal" quantities of the 7A100 are?

Regards,

Thomas

year IIRC):

Block RAM!

Thanks, this looks good. Just 2 EUR more expensive at Digikey than the Spartan 3, but more features. I think I'll use a 6SLX4.

BTW: this is my project, which I want to upgrade to a FPGA:

Should be hobby user friendly, so no BGA.

--
Frank Buss, http://www.frank-buss.de
electronics and more: http://www.youtube.com/user/frankbuss

I would forget about using an Artix until next year as I cant see anyone having them until then.

Jon

--------------------------------------- Posted through

Maybe You'd like to take Altera parts into consideration?

P.S. The project page is seems like half-lithuanian? :-)

Any device which is cheaper than a Spartan 6 (I need at least 144 pins)? I get the XC6SLX4-2TQG144C for EUR 9.89 from Digikey. Looks like the cheapest Cyclone I with TQFP 144 costs EUR 9.96 at Altera, and it is less powerful than the Spartan 6.

The menu and navigation? Looks like the site tries to localize it, it is German for me. I hope you don't mean my not so good English :-)

--
Frank Buss, http://www.frank-buss.de
electronics and more: http://www.youtube.com/user/frankbuss

The Lattice XO2's might also be a good fit, non-volatile (no boot rom needed).

The TQ100 pkg covers 256-2000 4-LUTs ( USD $4-$11 qty 1 @ DigiKey ) The TQ144 pkg covers 640-7000 4-LUTs ( USD $7-$14 qty 1 @ DigiKey )

Less block RAM & no DSP's compared to similar normalized LUT-count S6 parts; Lattice's XP2 family includes DSP blocks in a TQ144 pkg.

Another thing I like about the Lattice parts is that their free Diamond tool includes the OEM version of Synplify.

Brian

Looks interesting. I don't know Synplify, but a OEM version of Aldec Active-HDL is integrated, too, which I've used sometime ago and which was very good for debugging. And the 'C' parts need only one 3.3 V supply voltage for core and IO, so I don't need another voltage regulator (and power supply ramp rates requirements are very easy to fulfil: 0.01 - 100 mV/?s).

I've installed the Diamond IDE and it is very similar to Xilinx ISE. My current design, but with a 1 MB external SRAM instead of 128 kB, fits in

125 LUTs and the VHDL file compiled without changes (just some more warnings about unused pins).

--
Frank Buss, http://www.frank-buss.de
electronics and more: http://www.youtube.com/user/frankbuss