What's up with Xilinx

Insider trading?

Oh wait.....

JPMorgan (NYSE:JPM - Analyst Report) hiked its view on semiconductor company Xilinx Inc (NASDAQ:XLNX - Analyst Report) from cautious to constructive

I wish I could find their rating table. Never heard of 'constructive'

Cheers

I read somewhere in the technical press, a slashdot sort of site, that some Apple consumer product has an FPGA inside. Maybe that started an FPGA investor rush.

We're cutting over to Altera. The Xilinx software is a nightmare.

John

Same feeling here. This last weeks I have been working on a Xilinx board and I can certify that the ISE is a buggy and utterly slow nightmare. While having its own subtleties, Altera's Quartus II is much easier (and an order of magnitude faster) to work with.

Pere

Wanderer wrote: : Xilinx stock rose 3% yesterday. Anyone have any idea why?

Introduction of their 7th generation silicon?

The Zynq-7000 family with the embedded hard ARM looks nice.

Regards, Mikko

One of my guys was doing some tricky stuff with a 1 GHz SERDES on an Arria II GX (which is $450 worth of FPGA) and I asked him to change the pattern. He typed for a couple of seconds and the output changed. He had recompiled it and JTAGd it, in a few seconds!

It will take Xilinx years to unsnarl their tools... if ever.

John

Ya, I think it is the new Zynq stuff. I wish I could find a mutual fund that into that new ARM consortium, Freescale, TI, Xilinx, ST, Marvell etc. I'm not wealthy enough to amass individual stocks.

I decided to go back to Altera. The requirements changed so the little widget would no longer fit in the smallest Coolrunner. The larger chip was, well, larger. I asked our manufacturing guys if they could do a .5mm BGA and they told me to go for it. I only need the I/Os around the outside of the package, so don't even need micro-vias. I was starting to remember why I didn't like ISE.

Is the "free" or low-cost Altera software usable, or is it big bucks for the software?

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Rob was showing me the Altera "CPLD", which sure looks like a small FPGA with a flash for configuration, possibly a 2-chip-inside thing. Definitely not a sum-of-products architecture.

John

The free stuff is perfectly usable, for the devices it covers. Big bux is for big bux parts. A paid-for simulator (ModelSim) may be a good investment if you have any serious work to do. The freebies are limited to something like

Nope. One chip.

The only difference I can see between what Altera calls a "CPLD" and an "FPGA" are registers in the IOBs. The CPLD parts (e.g. MAX-II and MAX-V) have no registered I/Os. I think it's rather silly to leave them out, but I'm not in the marketing department. The MAX parts don't have differential I/Os either, likely a result of not having registered I/Os. Yes, the Xilinx Coolrunner does have a SoP architecture. I *much* prefer the finer grained architecture of an FPGA.