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Actel Cortex M1, any info on license fee?

Actel is known lying before, they namly claimed that the use of ARM7 in Actel FPGA is free, actually the FPGA with AES128 that allows the use of ARM7 costs 100 USD more then FPGA without the key, and well I would not call 100USD "free"

Now Actel is about to release the smaller Cortex based FPGA (eg another key for cortex-enable), again Actel claim its "Free" - I hope they are not lying this time, and there extra cost for Cortex is 0.00, but if that isnt the case, what is the license fee? is it the same

100USD as it is for ARM7 or is it smaller?

Antti

PS the 100 USD license fee has been quoted by the distributors for qty

  1. For 100.000 qty the license fee per chip drops below 2 USD per FPGA used.
Reply to
Antti
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Hi Antti, Of course, they will say they meant 'Separate agreement free', and 'free' to include on the royalty-paid FPGA. [ so, you can get FREE into the sentence ]

You missed one option: Cortex could be MORE than ARM7, it is after all, newer and smaller FPGA footprint. => likely more $$?

Still, if it is too high a price, you could always either add an external FLASH uC with ARM, or use an open-source FPGA optimised CPU.

But I'm sure you alreay knew that, and this was a rhetorical post :)

-jg

Reply to
Jim Granville

LOL, yes. I guess Actel marketing can brain-wash anybody explaining how free the free ARM7/Cortex really are.

agreed, the ACTUAL REAL license fee (what customer actually pays, not what Actel claims) can be even higher than for ARM7 as Cortex is smaller those the same SoC has more resources free for user design.

And yes, paying 100USD (or even 1USD) for the ARM inside Actel "license" where a ARM Flash MCUs cost = 1USD, is ridiculous... but guess its marketing.

Antti

Reply to
Antti

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