Do you like Virtex-5 ?

I see a pretty small category : ( where do these guys get their candidates ? - could it be advertiser revenue ? ) They also miss a [none of the above] vote, so readers cannot indicate if they agree with the shortlists.

Digital ICs, programmable logic, and memory: PEX 8548 PCI Express switch (PLX Technology) MR2A16A MRAM (Freescale) Virtex-5 LXT FPGAs (Xilinx)

and since the award is for innovation :

Adj.

1. innovative - ahead of the times;
2. innovative - being or producing something like nothing done or experienced or created before;

then the clear winner (by a large margin) is the MRAM.

That's far closer to innovative than "another iteration in FPGAs" ?

-jg

What do I do if I think Virtex-5 is really cool but no normal user can take delivery of one?

Most awards (e.g. the Oscars) are for products which are in meaningful production. Which doesn't seem to be the case for Virtex-5, and for Virtex-4, if distributor stockholdings are anything to go by.

Put in an order for 1000 pieces of any Virtex-5 LX or LXT (except perhaps for the biggest -330 parts) with the ES suffix (early silicon =with errata sheet), and watch us ship from inventory.

The trouble with distributors is that they do not want or like to stock "ES" parts. It's s sad story, for these ES parts are what seeds the important innovative user designs. But the distributor will (must!) take your order for shipment from Xilinx. There is no scarcity of Virtex-5 LX and LXT devices ! Our two foundries know how to make them in quantity... Complain to me if you encounter a delivery problem of ES devices. ( snipped-for-privacy@xilinx.com) Peter Alfke, not in Sales or Marketing, but with close ties to it.

Tim,

Well, that is odd, because we have ES material in stock (for V5).

In the V5 program, we have met, or met early every public date we gave.

After the V4 issues with FX MGT, we promised ourselves to never do that, ever. Never. Ever. So, if you are with-holding your vote because of your V4FX experience, we apologise, and promise to do much better (and are doing much better).

Peter and I have personally helped a few folks get their hands on their V5 ES parts, when it seemed that the distributors had failed them. If your distributor has failed you, we want to know.

As to who you want to vote for, you can always vote (in another beauty contest) for the "most innovative product in 2006 -- the Stratix III." (Note, quotes are from a press release!). That is a good one: the product will sample in September, 2007....

Of course, it is a free Internet, and the chip you should vote for is the one that best fit the criteria as you decide.

Austin

Not practical. There is no published pricing for these parts and distribution refuses to give pricing without an order.

To be blunt, Peter, you know that I have the highest regard for Xilinx, but the way you conduct your sales business these days is very disheartening. An unblinking concentration on the major accounts is just fine, but for the great majority of users:

- you cannot buy the Virtex-5

- you cannot buy most of the Virtex-4 range

- you cannot buy the Spartan-3E

- you cannot buy the Spartan-3A

- the Xilinx online store gives a new meaning to "store"

If you think I'm exaggerating, try the Avnet site:

Virtex-5 parts: all out of stock, no pricing Virtex-4 parts: out of 243 parts (mostly priced!) just 59 are available Spartan-3A parts: "Part is not found as a stocked item" Spartan-3E parts: prototype parts only and no higher volume pricing

NuHo show pretty much the same results.

If you, or anyone else in Xilinx, would like to improve matters, could you please publish a comprehensive price and availability list for the various families. Then the poor old working engineer can make a cost/benefit/risk analysis - after all, that's what you want your customers to do before setting forth on designs.

As an equal-opportunity economist, I tried the Stratix numbers at the Arrow site. As far as I can tell the StratixIII (EP3S) doesn't have an entry, like the Virtex-5. The StratixII (EP2S) picture appears to be about the same as the Virtex-4. I didn't check their equivalents to Spartan3.

But I'm not at all familiar with Altera and someone more in that culture may care to check or comment.

Am I the only one who finds him tiring?

I guess it would be funny if I wasn't using so many Xilinx parts.

Ricky.

To get an idea what information is needed, take a look at the Texas Instruments webpage and go to a particular device, like the just announced ADS5231 and follow the links to the part to reach e.g.

You find

- package option

- buget price

- Inventory

- Lead time

- distributors (if any yet)

- and a sample request entry

--
Uwe Bonnes                bon@elektron.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de

Institut fuer Kernphysik  Schlossgartenstrasse 9  64289 Darmstadt
--------- Tel. 06151 162516 -------- Fax. 06151 164321 ----------

To get an idea what information is needed, take a look at the Texas Instruments webpage and go to a particular device, like the just announced ADS5231 and follow the links to the part to reach e.g.

You find

- package option

- budget price

- Inventory

- Lead time

- distributors (if any yet)

- and a sample request entry

--
Uwe Bonnes                bon@elektron.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de

Institut fuer Kernphysik  Schlossgartenstrasse 9  64289 Darmstadt
--------- Tel. 06151 162516 -------- Fax. 06151 164321 ----------

And funny enough, Avnet gave us a first price estimation for quantity 1000 of an

1600E higher than the prototype price in their webshop. I don't know what they are smoking...

--
         Georg Acher, acher@in.tum.de
         http://www.lrr.in.tum.de/~acher
         "Oh no, not again !" The bowl of petunias

George Acher posted on Fri, 16 Feb 2007 13:12:14 +0000 (UTC):

"And funny enough, Avnet gave us a first price estimation for quantity 1000 of a n

1600E higher than the prototype price in their webshop. I don't know what they are smoking..."

I checked the price of a component (not an F.P.G.A. though) we needed on a few websites in December 2006. One of them was Avnet's and Avnet's website had the engineering (prototype, commercial quality) model priced at $11122.80 whereas Avnet's website had the radiation hardened space qualified (better quality) version priced much less at $3738. I performed this search due to miscommunication: we had actually already bought the radiation hardened version before December for far less than $5000 (though I do not know for how much exactly, nor from whom).

[..] They also miss a [none of the above] vote, so readers cannot indicate if they agree with the shortlists."

A very good point.

"Digital ICs, programmable logic, and memory: PEX 8548 PCI Express switch (PLX Technology) MR2A16A MRAM (Freescale) Virtex-5 LXT FPGAs (Xilinx)

and since the award is for innovation :

Adj.

1. innovative - ahead of the times;
2. innovative - being or producing something like nothing done or experienced or created before;

then the clear winner (by a large margin) is the MRAM.

That's far closer to innovative than "another iteration in FPGAs" ?"

Nah, the concept of randomness was mentioned hundreds of years ago but called "chaos".

It would be great to have Jim Granville as a reviewer for what passes as research in Europe: I attended doctoral workshops here in which many of the abstracts were written with the word "innovative" or "novel" to describe something which is a minor adaptation of existing work, and many of the abstracts were written as if it is amazing that civilization even managed to survive before the brilliant Ph.D. candidate managed to come up with something which will supposedly change the world.

Sincerely, Colin Paul Gloster

I don't know what the pricing on the Virtex-5 is going to look like, but there's a Virtex II Pro XC2VP100 chip in the Digi-Key catalog for $8400. I'm sure there is somebody, somewhere, who needs to miniaturize some system for an exotic, incredibly space-constrained application that can use something like this, or maybe the NSA needs it to crack codes or something. But, I can't possibly imagine a commercial product or even a research project that could rationally select a part that expensive. I also shudder to think of the CPU time and memory it will take to compile the config for that thing!

We just bought a used minivan for slightly more that that price, and expect to get a LOT more use out of it than an $8400 chip.

Jon

Oh, so I need to order 1000 pieces to get a prototype built?

Jon

This is a really disturbing trend. For a while I thought this was a temporary disturbance due to the RoHS debacle, but I think it is far more serious than that. I think the entire electronic industry in the US is in a death spiral. There are just a RAFT of parts that I can no longer get, that were stocked by several distributors just a year ago. (TI, and others, may be partially responsible for this by producing literally DOZENS of variants on ordinary parts. Some of the old CMOS 74HC parts are now available in

5, 6 even 7 different packages, 3 temp ranges, and dozens of varying electrical and speed ranges. So, a 74HC04 now expands to fill half a page of type that requires a microscope to read in the digi-key catalog. I have a small pile of the wrong size chips that I bought by mistake because I can't remember the package suffix, but that's my fault. Who can possibly stock all these variants?

I can't count the times in the last year or two that I've bought 5 parts to make a prototype, designed and debugged the board, and then had a mad scramble to try to obtain a small production quantity of several of the parts. Once I had Analog Devices quote me

120 weeks to obtain a certain part! A frantic search turned up a TI pin-compatible replacement at 1/6th the price! But, it sure got my blood pressure up until I had determined the substitute would actually work properly.

The distributors have warehouses full of non-RoHS compliant parts they need to get rid of before they can fill them back up with more stuff they won't be able to move. And, I have all these non-franchised distributors of questionable reliability constantly calling me trying to sell me something! I NEVER buy from them, but they KEEP calling.

Jon

Impressive. And six significant figures in the $11122.80 pricing! What sort of component? As I recall, the most expensive Xilinx FPGA is around $9800.

It has certainly cause a step effect, that has moved more stuff on this side to MOQ/Mfg leadtimes.

Logic has suffered from some false starts. Poor product management meant for a while, some vendors thought 5V was going to die - It took a while, but now most devices spec 1.65-5.5V logic capability, and hot-plug is a common new feature too.

There is no real excuse for temperature variants on logic (or SPLD/CPLD) these days, and most Logic devices (eg Philips/NXP) are SINGLE part numbers/devices, with TWO sets of data columns. One for 85'C and one for 125'C. They do not bother with two speed grades - it's not like they have signifcant yield issues these days!

That makes strong sense, as it simplifies the production and stocking, and speeds design wins.

Not all vendors are as up-to-date in their thinking, and some still see an industrial temp device, as license for more margin.

Since this started as a Xilinx thread, if we look at their OnLine "store",[CoolRunnerII example] they show ONLY commercial grade devices ?! - where does that leave industrial customers ? Are Xilinx yields really so variable, that they need 3 part numbers for each package-die variant ? - much more sensible to rationalise that down to 1, and greatly imrove the chances a designer will find it in stock!.

-jg

an

Don't blame Avnet, all pricing comes from Xilinx or the local rep.

The reality is that _if_ Xilinx thinks your product/project is worthwhile you get samples, small quantities for pilot production runs, and a good price for volume. If they don't, then you get to twist in the wind.

To be fair, this is a pretty common industry wide practice and Xilinx has always done very well by me.

Since Peter and Austin want to self-promote (or guerilla market) their way to Innovative Product of Year I suggest they put their money where their mouths are and put any Virtex-5 part up on the web store for a little less than the usual tourist pricing. After all, we've all heard how they've got _so_ many extra in stock they are looking to unload.

If they do that, they've bought my vote.

So what about it Peter and Austin, man or mouse?

Ricky.

ricky,

Peter and I take this issue of pricing and availability quite seriously.

We have begun discussions on the issue.

If you think you are upset by this, try to place yourselves in the shoes of the hundreds of hardware ICDES folks, and hundreds of software folks, and hundreds of production test and characterization engineers...you get the picture.

I went to some of the other nominee's websites, and on one, I could: order a sample, order parts, have a representative contact me (the buttons I could click on). 10K pricing was listed. I think there is significant room for improvement here.

Austin