Xilinx XC3S1000-4FG456I Altera EP2C20F484I8 Lattice ECP2-12E-5F484I
I find that the differences between the parts are not so great that I want to exclude any of them. I would like to get an idea of how the pricing compares. I am looking for other than the list prices which tell me more about the distributor's markup than it does the price I can otherwise get. I figure asking here might be quicker than waiting for a price quote.
ahh but you are out of luck. Whichever disti first quotes you on a part is the best price anyone else can give. Call it a conspiracy but that's the disti way.
Your best bet is to just ask a disti. If you are ordering small quantities, sometimes you can get a good price by piggybacking your order on someone else's order. For instance, I saw on Toms Hardware that the latest video card uses a 3S400. Chances are they are buying hundreds of thousand parts, so their disti could give a good price by ordering one extra tray every now and again for you. We did the same to get a 3S1000 at the same price as a
2S200E.If your product is selling a million a month or year, then the price you will get has absolutely no reflection on reality. it comes down to how cheaply and efficiently Xilinx or Altera or Lattice can produce the FPGA for you... and they will produce it for you too. In that volume you just about get to name your own price.
Simon
To get a feeling for Xilinx price, try the Xilinx webshop, nuhorizons and digikey. They all have on-line prices.
Are there any online prices for the Altera/Lattice parts?
-- Uwe Bonnes bon@elektron.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de Institut fuer Kernphysik Schlossgartenstrasse 9 64289 Darmstadt --------- Tel. 06151 162516 -------- Fax. 06151 164321 ----------
Very much what Simon said is that the distributors are working from a price book unless you get supported pricing for your project. Here in EEC I believe by law they can't enforce centrally fixed prices and the disti can vary prices out of their margin. Margins are tight nowadays and here in the UK we don't even have a choice of distributor for Xilinx to get a competative quote. The other vendors are not much better in having choice of whom to buy from. So pressure to give competative pricing isn't high unless you fall into the area of interest for the FPGA vendors.
If your project is reasonable volume, or FPGA value, then talk to your distributor and get supported pricing whoever's silicon you choose to use. If you don't have either of these attributes in your project you may be better to a third company like ourselves to manufacture . It may be cheaper than even doing it yourself because of the better FPGA pricing that can be obtained by volume users of FPGA silicon.
John Adair Enterpoint Ltd. - Home of Raggedstone1. The Low Cost Spartan-3 Development Board.
Yes, but all of these sources have typically poor pricing, especially the manufacturer's store. FPGA pricing will vary signficantly with volume and that will never show on the web pages at Digikey or Arrow.
I understand how pricing works. I would just like to avoid the disti because it typically takes them a week to close the loop with the product manager and the vendor and they always want to play 20 questions with me. Where I work they take every little part very seriously and I am not looking at this for a current project, I am planning a future one. The vendors are very, very supportive, too much so. For once I want to find out what prices others are getting without going through the disti mill.
Anyone using the specific parts listed above?
there is no real good answer, - pricing differs. for the parts you asked the package price is already heavily in count not only the logic cell count
Lattice ECP2 - only the ECP2-50 is currently sampling so there is no one using the ECP2-12 part yet.
For Lattice their claim is that EC pricing will beat or meat any Spartan3 pricing for similar density(unless Xilinx is selling at dumping prices), and that EC is 50% cheaper than ECP
Altera pricing is agressive as well, so it really depends on the disti and your project how good pricing you can get. S3-1000 could go to around 20USD(depending on package), ECP2-12 price from rule of thumb should be 12 USD (lowest speed, cheapest package), your package selection is more expensive so it may add up significant price numbers :(
dont know if it helps you any - you possible are better off to decide from the features and support and availability. If you can wait for ECP2-12 part then that has some of the best features for low cost FPGA (nonvolatile secure key, SPI multi-boot, DDR2 support, etc), if you need sooner than that then try get S3 pricing down to what you need.
Digikey and vendor online pricing are no good for the best price you can get, at the end you still end up talking to the disti
Antti
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