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FPGAs you can buy

michaelkellett

I know  a lot of you are busy with the Sparty 7 board so there may be a lack of bandwidth.

Many parts are unobtainable now: Farnell list 541 Xilinx FPGAs of whcih two are in stock:

image

These are nice enough parts but no good for playing with at home ! (and anyway they only have one of each)

Lattice and Altera used to be good for simple parts in reasonable packages but have also becom impossible to buy.

I've been keeping an eye on the market and especially on Gowin and Efnix.

For simple prototyping and projects you need packages you can solder by hand or with simple gear (TQFP or QFN).

And for small budget (home or commercial) projects you need simple dev software, small gate counts and low cost.

Digikey currently have Efnix T8 and T20 parts in 144 pin TQFP in stock at £5.73 and about £10 each in small numbers. They have thousands.

The T8 gives you 8k LUTs, 8 18x18 multipliers and not a lot else, but it is low power and quite big enough for all sorts of good work (about half of my commercial designs have used less than 8k LUTs)

I've ordered a dev board £74 and a few chips.

Mouser have some Gowin parts but the prices are a bit high.

MK

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  • There are also Microsemi/Microchip FPGAs. Theese seem to be quite comparable to the Efinix ones. As far as i know the IGLOO lineup also features NVM to store the bitstream inside. I think that the software used to program Microchip FPGAs is very simmilar to Vivado.

    Sometimes buying modules can be quite beneficial since they typically feature all of the power supplies, memory etc. In total these can be also cheaper. Looking around i have found quite a few with Lattice ics, that are in stock. There are also options like MKR Vidor 4000 from arduino. 

  • in reply to jure

    Microchip have a wide range of FPGAs, from their acquisitions of Atmel and Microsemi. Digikey do have several in stock in small numbers, some in TQFP packages. They are quite  a bit more expensive than Efinix but several are quite reasonably priced.

    The free toolset offered is Libero Soc Silver. I have not looked at the Libero tools for quite a while, earlier versions were a good deal easier to get into than Vivado.

    Definitely can add Microchip as a source of FPGAs you can actually buy, at least in small numbers.

    MK

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  • in reply to jure

    Microchip have a wide range of FPGAs, from their acquisitions of Atmel and Microsemi. Digikey do have several in stock in small numbers, some in TQFP packages. They are quite  a bit more expensive than Efinix but several are quite reasonably priced.

    The free toolset offered is Libero Soc Silver. I have not looked at the Libero tools for quite a while, earlier versions were a good deal easier to get into than Vivado.

    Definitely can add Microchip as a source of FPGAs you can actually buy, at least in small numbers.

    MK

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