Spartan3 availability

Hi Leon, Same situation here in Germany. I ordered Spartan-3 FPGAs in September. My distributor cannot tell me when I'll get them. It seems that Xilinx serves the "big players" first and does not care about small customers at all ! An "unofficial" statement from a Xilinx employee was "Spartan-3 is for high-volume customers only" I believe they have yield problems.

Maybe someone from Xilinx can comment this.

-Manfred Kraus

That shouldn't be a surprise, since it's the same thing that happened with the Spartan 2. It was nearly a year between availability to high-volume customers, and availability to everyone else.

Seems unlikely that you'll get any official comment. They allocate the limited production where it will do them the most good. I would do the same in their position.

If you're not going to buy in high volumes, you shouldn't try to use the latest bleeding-edge chips. That's true of chips of any sort, not just FPGAs.

Hate to say it, but this is why I use Altera. I can get Cyclones -- today. And their free tools support the entire family.

Hard to beat that.

To be fair to Xilinx, I missed this:

"Pricing and Availability The XC3S50, XC3S200, and XC3S400 Spartan-3 devices with 50,000, 200,000, and 400,000 system gates respectively are available for less than $6.50*. The XC3S1000 Spartan-3 device with 1 million system gates is also available for under $12.00*. The entire Spartan-3 family will be available in volume production in early 2004 from distributors worldwide, or direct from Xilinx at

"

It does imply that some devices are available now, however. Perhaps they are simply not available from distributors until early next year.

Leon

--
Leon Heller, G1HSM
Email: aqzf13@dsl.pipex.com
My low-cost Philips LPC210x ARM develpment system:
http://www.geocities.com/leon_heller/lpc2104.html

That's not entirely true. At least very small quantities (single trays) gain a lot of design wins without hurting the volume shipments to the big players. The real problem are the arrogant big distributors in europe (and xilinx as it does not understand that these distributors are a problem)

I once had a case where Insight plainly lied to me about the availability of samples in munich. Munich told me, that they had none, but the Insight devisions in the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark and UK just told me "Please order in Munich, they have stock".

A Xilinx representative in the UK was very helpful in convincing Insight to send me the chips, but it took him a lot of emails and phone calls.

I said before that Xilinx really needs a small distributor in Europe beside the big guys Insight and Avnet.

Peter Alfke said that there is hope....

Kolja Sulimma

today.

Aye, but to be fair, how long has Cyclone been out now?

Nial (with no real preference between A or X).

------------------------------------------------ Nial Stewart Developments Ltd FPGA and High Speed Digital Design

: To be fair to Xilinx, I missed this:

: "Pricing and Availability : The XC3S50, XC3S200, and XC3S400 Spartan-3 devices with 50,000, 200,000, : and 400,000 system gates respectively are available for less than : $6.50*. The XC3S1000 Spartan-3 device with 1 million system gates is : also available for under $12.00*. The entire Spartan-3 family will be : available in volume production in early 2004 from distributors : worldwide, or direct from Xilinx at

"

: It does imply that some devices are available now, however. Perhaps they : are simply not available from distributors until early next year.

That's probably marketing, that put out the note above.

The most recent datasheet

dated April

2003 on page 4 Product Ordering and availability still lists all devices in parenthesis, with

I guess if some parts would already be in general availability the technical people would feel worth the update to that datasheet.

Bye

--
Uwe Bonnes                bon@elektron.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de

Institut fuer Kernphysik  Schlossgartenstrasse 9  64289 Darmstadt
--------- Tel. 06151 162516 -------- Fax. 06151 164321 ----------

But you were able to buy small quantities early... not after a year - IMHO.

--
Jerry

It is not so much a matter of them not being available, it is more a question of how you are trying to get them. You need to talk to your distributor and get them to line up a few chips for you. I have not gotten mine yet, but I have been assured that they will be coming in the next month.

--

Rick "rickman" Collins

rick.collins@XYarius.com
Ignore the reply address. To email me use the above address with the XY
removed.

Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company
Specializing in DSP and FPGA design      URL http://www.arius.com
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I think it is more interesting that this thread has been discussed for a full day now and no one from Xilinx has commented. Especially when one poster mentioned rumors of yield issues. I would expect Xilinx to be jumping all over that if it were just a rumor.

--

Rick "rickman" Collins

rick.collins@XYarius.com
Ignore the reply address. To email me use the above address with the XY
removed.

Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company
Specializing in DSP and FPGA design      URL http://www.arius.com
4 King Ave                               301-682-7772 Voice
Frederick, MD 21701-3110                 301-682-7666 FAX

Of course not! Yields are one of the most carefully guarded trade secrets of semiconductor companies. The fact that a semi company doesn't talk about yields, even to dispell a rumor, does not lend any credibility to the rumor.

I have had an email from someone at Xilinx; they will be available from distributors in the new year.

Leon

--
Leon Heller, G1HSM
Email: aqzf13@dsl.pipex.com
My low-cost Philips LPC210x ARM development system:
http://www.geocities.com/leon_heller/lpc2104.html

This thread pretends that availability and yield are just a yes/no issue. Let me assure you that it is not. Our industry is very aggressive (and very successful) in pushing barely-proven technology into volume production. Naturally, the yield at first is not as good as it will be after a while. If it were, we would be accused of not being aggressive enough. I am not aware of any Spartan3-specific problems, but it does not surprise me that availability is not perfect yet. The important thing is that the design works, which it does! Yield has traditionally ALWAYS been improved with a bit of hard work. (I could cite hundreds of examples from my almost four decades in this industry...)

Now you have my personal and honest opinion, don't read anything complicated or devious into it. Peter Alfke

rickman wrote:

More completely: "Open for order entry end December 03. Orders will then go on allocation."

And that is for pretty big volumes ;-) I guess the PR people don't like to confuse a good story with inconvenient information.

Same to me: Insight Italy says some samples of XC3S200-4TQ144 could be available early next year.

Not sure what you mean -- asking "how long have them been out" makes my point. They're out. You can get them. Now. None of this monkey business about "maybe sometime next year in the first or second quarter. Maybe."

My schedules can't revolve around when Xilinx may or may not decide to grant me the privelege of being able to actually acquire some of their parts.

Key words here are "some" and "could".

Having used FPGAs since they were first introduced, I can safely say that in nearly every case, X or A parts will do the job. Only in very rare instances does one product have a clear, definitive advantage over the other.

So when choosing to use one vendor over the other, it usually boils down to personal preference.

For the life of me, I cannot understand why anyone on this thread would prefer to be treated the way X is treating them. Do all your projects and products have such open-ended schedules that you can deal with the moving target of availability that X keeps forcing you to accept?

If you choose to use parts from X, you shouldn't complain about the way they treat you -- this is hardly the first time they've behaved this way. Caused me to switch allegiance to A and never look back or regret it, and more importantly to never miss a production schedule due to them not having parts many, many months after they advertised that they would be available.

Good point, but the Spartan3 is a pretty terrific part for many applications. It's like dating the girl with naturally curly hair - more trouble, but worth it.

To me, X has always delivered. Very good technical support. Good presence here on newsgroup. Good price. Insight Italy never missed a delivery, after a careful planning of orders. That's matters to me.

Never tried A, though.

Tight schedule ? I'd use Spartan II, as I'm doing now (2003 project, and future update in 2004). I'm very happy with them.

What I'm now thinking about is what I'll put on production on 2005. So I feel confident I can consider Spartan 3, also.

Announcing parts early actually helps: I can start designing my system NOW. In any case, I wouldn't even try to load the design on actual HW as long as I'm not completely satisfied on simulation results.

But I acknowledge I'm perhaps a lucky guy: I have the luxury to plan in advance for upgrades or new designs.