cool chart

Jul 28, 2009 25 Replies

The real issue for most companies that use significant quantities of product is cost. To that end, you always have to keep the vendor honest by having an alternative to their parts. I know for a fact that if they want your business, they will cut prices to the bone leaving you all the fat. So you have to be able to switch vendors without significant impact on your design implementation. Even if they won't switch for a given product, they have to be able to use the part that has the lowest cost. One place I worked knew this very well and every new socket was competed on price before the board was designed.

Of course this does not apply if your design requires some feature that is not available in a competitor's part, such as a particular high speed serial I/O capability. Some vendors will tell you that this is not a smart way to go since you can't take advantage of "special" features of each part. I have yet to find an application where using a "special" feature will change the implementation so much that it will allow me to use a cheaper part from a different vendor. I'm sure that can happen, but I don't expect it to happen a lot.

So for most cost sensitive apps, a company will do better to compete the FPGA vendors against each other or you will be giving them the fat on your designs.

Rick

There is a hole in their timelines, as Signetics became Philips/ Signetics without a 5 year gap!\\

I see jameco still show stock of N82S100 !

- and QPsemi have some legacy-pathway products

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I think they even did a re-spin of the 82S100 :)

-jg

That is some pretty good advice. It's probably been that way for a long time. Personal preference often doesn't play a role with respect to economics.

=20

You can bet it gets seriously minimized versus accountant's cost reductions.

problem.

them

Turns out the there *are* some engineering-sample S6's available, and it looks like we may get a few, so we can design them into a couple of new projects.

Sadly, we are on the FPGA-addiction bandwagon. Every new gen of speed and goodies lets us pump up the performance of a product, or write an even-more-ludicrous proposal. In the current case, the S6/45 has two hard DRAM controllers, megabits of block ram, and 58 DSP slices, most of which resources we intend to gobble up. I can ask my FPGA guy for the most insane signal processing, and in a few hours it's done.

John

I remember hearing of that second and third hand. Nice to hear someone actually there.

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