Has anyone dealt with Avnet? or NuHorizons when trying to purchase Xilinx stuff

Hello,

I am new to this FPGA stuff and I wanted to purchase a starter kit and get volume pricing for a few Xilinx FPGA's

If one where to buy through Avnet or maybe NuHorizons, would anyone like to share your past experiences when working with them?

It seems all they care are who you are, what company you work with, what you exactly are you doing. In other words, how many parts are you going to buy from us before I spend any time with you.

Do you have to be a big company or are they trying to discourage small startups or students or whoever?

Like what do you have to purchase, software or hardware or what dollar amount to do you have to purchase just to get few questions answered, sales wise for pricing or even worse, tech support?

Thanks.

Reply to
Raban
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I have, for small (prototype-level) quantities without any particular hassle. Been a while, though, and things may have changed.

Also take a look at Digilent; they have quite a few FPGA dev boards. IIRC, they produced (and may still; I haven't purchased any lately) the dev boards for Xilinx, so you're buying from the source.

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Rich Webb     Norfolk, VA
Reply to
Rich Webb

The Avnet sales guy and his Xilinx FAE were in here on Tuesday. They're pretty good.

Naturally.

The more money you have, the more interested they will be in spending hours on your behalf. Lots of things in life are like that.

They're a distributor, so probably won't want to provide much support if it's not going to pay off. You can buy their demo boards, or somebody else's; you can download a bazillion appnotes from Xilinx; you can ask Xilinx questions, directly or on the fpga newsgroup. Lots of people get started that way.

Incidentally, one of the new Vertex chips costs $6000. Avnet has one customer who puts 16 of these on a board, then fills a crate with boards. We saw one of those boards at the Embedded Systems Conference yesterday. Impressive. They use - rough eyeball guess - 100 bypass caps per FPGA.

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I bet *that* customer gets pretty good support.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

Holy schnockers!

DN9000K10 'Bride of Monster' Xilinx Virtex-5 Based ASIC Prototyping Engine.

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Impressive, indeed.

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Rich Webb     Norfolk, VA
Reply to
Rich Webb

It seems Xilinx' top end has always been $6K a copy. ;-)

Hardware simulation engine? (Cadence/QuickTurn?)

That is a hunk of change. The system I'm working on has five FPGAs per video channel (TV channel + FLIR channel). Two Virtex4 FX100s, two Virtex2 3000s, and a smaller Virtex 4 (can't remember the size). The FX100s go for just under $3K each.

I bet!

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Keith
Reply to
krw

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