Re: pricing, cyclone or spartan

: I guess the smallest spartan III and cyclone devices should also come down
: below 10$ but then S3-50 does not have BRAM and both Spartan and Cyclone
: do require config memory to be present what may add significant amount to
: the final price (both money as board estate, etc)

XC3S50 _will_ have  BRAM, only the first batch didn't have.

Bye

Hi Antti,


Have you used the Actel FPGAs? Are there free tools? Can the flash also be
used to store additional data? Looks like a good candidate for a soft core
cpu (as for JOP :-)

Martin
----------------------------------------------
JOP - a Java Processor core for FPGAs:
http://www.jopdesign.com /

for this volume you will obviously need to contact the disti/factory
but for the Cyclone the quantity  50K pricing from the disti as below.
better deals may be found I suspect if the volume goes up a bit and in
2004 ...

EP1C3 $5 , EP1C4 $11 , EP1C6 $13 , EP1C12 $27 , EP1C20 $60

down
to
without
The cheapest way for the configuration is using a standard flash and a small
PLD (like max7032 or max7064) and you can use the rest of the flash for
other data (like program for a soft core cpu).

Martin

The smallest Spartan3 part, the -50 came out without BlockRAM and DCMs,
but only in its rushed "early silicon" a.k.a. "engineering samples"
form. The real part, coming later this year, will have BRAMs and DCMs,
just like all its larger brothers do.

Peter Alfke
================
Antti Lukats wrote:

come down

<...snip...>


The Xilinx Spartan-3 XC3S50, in its production form, has four 18Kbit block
RAMs (BRAM), four 18x18 hardware multipliers, and two digital clock
managers.  For the correct specifications, see
http://www.xilinx.com/bvdocs/publications/ds099-1.pdf .

In volume, the XC3S50, the XC3S200, and the XC3S400 are all less than $10 in
the smallest packages.

To reduce the overall "solution cost", Spartan-3 FPGAs optionally use Xilinx
PlatformFlash, which does NOT add a significant amount to the final price.
See http://www.xilinx.com/platformflash .  Alternatively, configuration data
can be stored in just about any non-volatile memory available elsewhere in
the system, such as ...

  * Same Flash that holds the boot code or application code for a processor
or microcontroller,
  * Downloaded from hard disk.
---------------------------------
Steven K. Knapp
Sr. Applications Manager, Xilinx Inc.
General Products Division
Spartan-3/II/IIE FPGAs
http://www.xilinx.com/spartan3
---------------------------------
Spartan-3:  Make it Your ASIC