It's about a year that Spartan3E are on the market but i am still confused on pricing. On:
On the major distributors (Nu Horizons, Avnet) the same part goes for about $45. Is $9 a marketing thing only, or is there any chance that quantity prices will drop to that level ?
tullio
tullio schrieb:
did you ask quote for 500,000 pieces single order? its clearly stated this is possible price for 0.5M pieces orders only.
for smaller orders you may be able to get the price down to around $20 USD slowest speed cheapest package, but dont expect prices below that unless you are really buyins millions of pieces.
Antti
I seriously doubt the 1200 will see $20 even in the smallest package unless you are looking at a huge number. I had a quote on the 3S400 in the FG456 at qty 50k and it was still only $20. the 1200 is three times larger and even in the FG256 package it is going to cost a bit.
Like Antti said, the published numbers are for literally million piece orders, and even then only if you beat them about the head and shoulders. That is why it is economically to your advantage to design your product so you can use more than one brand of FPGAs. Then you can leverage a competitive bid and literally get half the price you might get otherwise. The vendors (at least the Xilinx vendors) will try to tell you the best way to save $$$ on the chips is to tailor your code to their brand of chip cutting the LUT count and going with a smaller part. But that might get you a savings or it might not. But having the option of buying the parts from another vendor will definitely get you a better price on *any* part you decide to use.
Although they can be stupid about that too. I once was designing a Lucent part into my board. A vendor wanted to compete the Xilinx part on price and I gave them the parameters I used to select the part. When they came back with a price and I told them that was much higher than the Lucent part they asked me which one. I gave them the part number and they tried to tell me their competitive part was different from the one they had picked from my specs. Yes, the new part was cheaper than the Lucent part (a little), but it didn't have enough I/Os for my design and would not work! I tried to explain it to them and they refused to believe that their part was not equivalent. Talk about stupid!!!
I forgot to mention that much like buying a car, you should *never*,
*ever* pay list price for FPGAs in any real quantity. Even if it is only 1000 a year, you can likely get 20% to 50% off of distributor list just by asking for it. You can get closer to 50% if you tell them a target price and that you are shopping it around to the different FPGA makers.ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.