POLL What's the Next Step for the FPGA Group?

RE: POLL What's the Next Step for the FPGA Group?

dougw — Tue, 26 Apr 2022 14:19:02 GMT

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.

RE: POLL What's the Next Step for the FPGA Group?

michaelkellett — Tue, 26 Apr 2022 08:58:36 GMT

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.

RE: POLL What's the Next Step for the FPGA Group?

Andrew J — Mon, 25 Apr 2022 20:58:31 GMT

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.