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Will Spartan-6 be totally left out migrating to Spartan-7 and further in series? Your thoughts?

navadeepganeshu

Its amazing to see rapid advancements in parallel computing and FPGA technologies in recent days with things growing super complex. This Spartan-6 to 7 migration is likely one of the good example for this. We have been seeing companies keeping themselves on full thrust on bringing advancements in the field improving version by version. Sometimes the older version is scraped away or mostly a legacy reference on top of which the next one is built. Majorly, market/customers decide whether to hold with previous version still longer or upgrade as it is a far better/efficient upgrade. 

Recently I came across Beningo's post questioning Why Won’t the 8-bit Microcontroller Die? and a legend told 8 bits is dead(but maybe not) some 12 years ago. Midst of all these, I am here thinking how's it been going with FPGAs? What do you think about Spartan-6 to 7 or any series for that matter?

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  • Xilinx is most interested in the high-end high-profit market.  But that leaves room at the bottom for other companies.  My favorite Xilinx family was the Spartan-3A, a relatively simple architecture that was pretty easy to understand.  The Spartan-6 clocking alone is a steep learning curve.  I haven't delved into Spartan 7.

    These days I like the Lattice iCE40 FPGAs which Lattice acquired from Silicon Blue.  They have 4-input LUTs like the Spartan-3A.  They also have open-source design tools.  So while 4-input LUTs may be obsolete as far Xilinx is concerned, you can get small cheap FPGAs from others.  Similarly, Intel specializes in gigantic hot multi-core high-performance processors even though they invented the microcontroller long ago with the 8048.  They leave the low-profit microcontroller business to STM and others.

  • in reply to johnbeetem

    Interesting outlook. I had never thought about it. 

    iCE40s are really nice from what I have seen from some people using. I have thought of getting hands-on with one, but just felt that there's already an established xilinx toolchain and documentation which is widely used and also saw contests coming up using them. And I once thought ok, now let me understand Zynq 7000 in detail, but as you mentioned, its too deep and what's in documentation is just a very high level abstraction and proprietaryness. They have kind of allowed us not to worry about internals much bringing flashy HLS, Microblaze, Block design and abstractions like that.

    True that open source toolchains and simplistic architecture will be of great use here allowing user customization and feature addition to some extent atleast. I will now take a chance to explore opensource tools and low-end FPGA. Let's see, its just a matter of penetration to market for these FPGAs I feel.

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  • in reply to johnbeetem

    Interesting outlook. I had never thought about it. 

    iCE40s are really nice from what I have seen from some people using. I have thought of getting hands-on with one, but just felt that there's already an established xilinx toolchain and documentation which is widely used and also saw contests coming up using them. And I once thought ok, now let me understand Zynq 7000 in detail, but as you mentioned, its too deep and what's in documentation is just a very high level abstraction and proprietaryness. They have kind of allowed us not to worry about internals much bringing flashy HLS, Microblaze, Block design and abstractions like that.

    True that open source toolchains and simplistic architecture will be of great use here allowing user customization and feature addition to some extent atleast. I will now take a chance to explore opensource tools and low-end FPGA. Let's see, its just a matter of penetration to market for these FPGAs I feel.

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