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  • Author Author: rscasny
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POLL What's the Next Step for the FPGA Group?

rscasny

element14 has been doing a lot of content and projects on FPGAs and related products. The company has supported as not only with knowledged-based events and activities like roadtests and our current running special campaign on the Spartan-6 to -7 Migration. it has also been trying to up the prizes awarded in these programs. It's a great investment in the community and our members, and we plan on continuing our initiatives.

But what's next? I have a short poll for you to vote on to answer that question. 

  • in reply to michaelkellett

    It is crazy how scarce they have become.  I too started looking at Efinix and Gowin.

  • in reply to michaelkellett

    I started collecting information about the Renesas FPGAs with the long term goal to build an eval board for them. They achieve low power by being OTP and factory programmed. But it seems possible to develop with them through external FLASH or on the fly programming. 

    https://hackaday.io/project/184088-goforge-a-renesas-fpga-board

  • FPGAs are so complex or capable of such complex designs, completing a project in a reasonable time means a lot of the heavy lifting needs to be already done. This implies demo cards with built-in interfaces like MIPI and HDMI and demo software.

    So far I have not jumped into FPGA projects on element14 due to the large time commitment required, but I am eyeing Polar Fire, when they become available.

  • I voted other.

    Right now the big issue with FPGAs is that you can't get them !

    A BIG step forward for Avnet group would be to start stocking one of the low cost brands (Efinix or Gowin, preferably both) that can still ship at least a few low cost parts.

    I liked the Altera MAX10 but they are on 12 months+ delivery, as are Spartan 6 and 7 -  so who cares about migrating  ?

    Same story with Lattice as well.

    But ignoring all that ........

    An awful lot of the FPGA stuff that has been featured on E14 is about using FPGAs with soft processors or built in ARM processors running Linux. Most of the Xilinx related questions are about Linux or wrestling with the design tools.

    A ,lot of these things would be better done using a suitable micro or application processor.

    I'd like to see a lot more about using FPGAs where they excel, coded in VHDL or Verilog and doing hard real time stuff and logic replacement.

    Dialog (belongs to Renesas now) have a range of small, ultra low power, FPGAs in the pipeline - it would be nice to see more about them.

    MK

  • The Summer of FPGA was excellent.  The options aren’t really exclusive: it would be great to develop quite a complex project from scratch, e.g. some sort of robot, for which a kit of parts could be purchased to follow on, leading to a competition to reward the best personalised extension to the robot within s fixed price limit to make it fair.