Battle of the Vapours

There are restrictions on exporting (from the US) devices above a certain level of sophistication. And the government measures that as toggle rate. (The idea was to avoid helping the "evil empire" develop better missile guidance systems). The Cold War lives forever... Peter Alfke

OK, I suppose that makes a certain degree of sense; I wonder slightly how the big microprocessor vendors get round that issue. There were those Apple adverts saying that their machine was by export-control standards a supercomputer, but I've seen plenty of dual-G5 boxes on my side of the Atlantic.

With my Dr Evil hat on, I wonder slightly how you set a maximum toggle frequency when the LUT propagation time is already down to 700ps or so

-- I wonder if it's a matter of refraining from heroic engineering efforts to keep parasitic capacitance down in the flip-flops, or a couple of lines in the depths of the hardware-compiler?

Tom

Probably, as Altera mention Q2 2005 for samples of most devices.

Lattice also have a new family, with their prices quoted at 1K ( compared with the others of 18 months out, and asymptope volumes :) Lattice also say first samples in July 2004, (yes, next month, not next year...)

AMD has announced a lower cost MPU, still no word on Price/Bits, but it will be real well in advance of the vapor-FPGAs. Hard to imagine it not being 64bit, given the [marketing advantage/silicon cost] ratios...

-jg

Well, the US does not consider the UK an "evil empire" (at least not since the war of 1815), so the export rules vary by country. Last I looked many years ago, Albania was at the bottom of the list...

Regarding max toggle rate, LUT and clock-to-Q are just one ingredient, routing is the bigger one. Present routing structures favor complex designs, but hurt very simple situations, like toggling flip-flops.

Peter Alfke

Tom, I think you're getting the wrong end of the stick. Xilinx make their parts go as fast as they want. They then have to publish an FTOG figure which the US government then uses to decide if the chips should be restricted, and if so, to which countries. Presumably you're British, so (according to the export rules!) not part of the 'axis of evil'. You'll get the parts OK, but don't build them into something you're planning on selling in North Korea. Or there'll be ....trouble... Cheers mate, Syms. p.s. Google for microprocessors "export restrictions"

So are products containing Spartan 3 parts at 500 MHz toggle freq restricted? I have looked at several government web sites and not been able to determine what is restricted and what is not.

--

Rick "rickman" Collins

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Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company
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The restrictions can be very strange. I was involved in a converstion about GSM cell phone manufacturing and repair once. Seems the encryption in the GSM phones was "export controlled" by the US. So the phones could be made outside the US and shipped in. But they could not be shipped back out for repair.

--

Rick "rickman" Collins

rick.collins@XYarius.com
Ignore the reply address. To email me use the above address with the XY
removed.

Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company
Specializing in DSP and FPGA design      URL http://www.arius.com
4 King Ave                               301-682-7772 Voice
Frederick, MD 21701-3110                 301-682-7666 FAX

The politicians, of course, have no idea what any of this means. I can picture them looking at the specs...: Toggle rates of 500MHz, yes, that's fast.....

3.3GBps - hmm, no 3.3 is less than 500, so that's OK 10Gbps - still OK, 10 is < 500 2.4 terabit - whoa, someone could build a tera-network using that!! :)

Jim,

You are absolutely correct: we must prevent tera.

There is a war on tera, right now!

Austin

PS: I've herad of 'two bit' networks, but tera-bit networks???

Jim Granville wrote: