Aw, bummer. It looks like makers and hobbyists are not buying enough Lattice FPGAs. Lattice is announcing layoffs:
hillsboronewstimes.com/busines…
#FPGA
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Aw, bummer. It looks like makers and hobbyists are not buying enough Lattice FPGAs. Lattice is announcing layoffs:
hillsboronewstimes.com/busines…
#FPGA
Garrett
in reply to Your friendly 'net denizen • • •Your friendly 'net denizen
in reply to Garrett • • •Garrett
in reply to Your friendly 'net denizen • • •Your friendly 'net denizen
in reply to Garrett • • •Your friendly 'net denizen
in reply to Your friendly 'net denizen • • •@garrett
The advantages of FPGAs are fine grained parallelism and the reprogrammability. So if you can solve your problem with a micro, use that. But if you need custom logic, and ASIC or IC is not within budget, then you should look towards FPGAs for complex problems and PLDs for glue logic. Some products combine micros and FPGAs. So you can get both in one package.
(Sorry, that was more than one toot.)
Garrett
in reply to Your friendly 'net denizen • • •monoxane ⁂
in reply to Garrett • • •monoxane ⁂
in reply to monoxane ⁂ • • •Garrett
in reply to monoxane ⁂ • • •Your friendly 'net denizen
in reply to Garrett • • •@garrett @monoxane Those are great examples. Another A/V example is you'll find them embedded in products like the Blackmagic line (not Lattice in those from what I've seen, but Xilinx). They're also commonly found in oscilloscopes.
They're embedded in a lot of things, and you may not even be aware as it's not really a bullet point feature. For a more "in your face" example, the retro gaming crowd uses them to emulate old gaming systems. For example the MiSTer project:
mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_…
MiSTer FPGA Documentation
mister-devel.github.ioGarrett
in reply to Your friendly 'net denizen • • •Elena ``of Valhalla''
in reply to Garrett • •@Garrett @monoxane ⁂ @Your friendly 'net denizen centuries ago I saw people using hdmi2usb.tv/home/ , which uses an FPGA, for DebConf, but it looks like that project is no longer active
edit: they are still mentioned on wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebConf/… however
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Hans
in reply to Your friendly 'net denizen • • •YRabbit
in reply to Your friendly 'net denizen • • •Your friendly 'net denizen
in reply to YRabbit • • •Your friendly 'net denizen
in reply to Your friendly 'net denizen • • •YRabbit
in reply to Your friendly 'net denizen • • •Of course it is possible to conduct research in large volumes, but from the times of the institute I remember that a random sample is usually indicative. I tried again and the result is even worse: 138000 LUTs vs 5300 LUTs.
I should note that the number of LUTs is such a clear indicator, but also the other board components are not in favour of Lattice - the oldest Tangnano models (even those that are no longer in production) run at a minimum of 27MHz
YRabbit
in reply to YRabbit • • •(and have this quartz on the board), Tangmega 138k at a minimum of 50MHz. The iCE40 is 12MHz.
The fact that you were able to buy an iCE40 in 2015 at a reasonable price (although it depends on how you look at it - you see I don't quote prices for boards of similar power:) ) tells me that their irresponsible and unwise pricing policy in the following years led to the current state of affairs.
Your friendly 'net denizen
in reply to YRabbit • • •Diego Roversi
in reply to YRabbit • •YRabbit
in reply to Diego Roversi • • •Not ‘they’, but yes the fully open source toolkit is there - github.com/YosysHQ/apicula
Also Gowin itself has a ‘student’ version designed to support 3 types (or families, I can't remember) of FPGAs and in addition the fully licensed version requires only registration on the website.
gowinsemi.com/en/support/home/
GitHub - YosysHQ/apicula: Project Apicula 🐝: bitstream documentation for Gowin FPGAs
GitHub