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Kwag's avatar
Kwag
Icon for New Contributor rankNew Contributor
4 years ago

FPGA Inventories/Leadtime

Does anyone have any insight to what is going on with FPGA inventories. Do you have to be a select Intel partner to get parts? Standard distribution (Digikey) has nothing. When we ask leadtime the an...
Kwag's avatar
Kwag
Icon for New Contributor rankNew Contributor
4 years ago

I am aware of shortages from all the other vendors but at least can get responses from them. Try and find how to talk to anyone at Intel and there is just generic "customer support". I know the problem exists with all semi makers but the lack of ability to have a conversation with someone from the company is frustrating. I originally used Xilinx product switched to Altera due to power performance improvements I had in my designs(20 years ago). I was concerned when Intel bought them for exact fact they would use them as support products for their server type products.

The semi-conductor industry needs to support all of us not just "Tier 1" customers. Or Engineers being what they are will find other solutions without them.

  • raviganesh's avatar
    raviganesh
    Icon for Occasional Contributor rankOccasional Contributor
    4 years ago

    My experience dates back 25 years ago. At that time our vendor was Lattice-Vantis and our language was ABEL. It was incredible how we had to code at a flip flop level. There was no in-system programming. It has to be done in a DataIO device, soldered or socketed on the board and tested. Any errors, desocket/desolder and repeat – life was tough.

    EEPROM based PLD were getting in to obsolescence and we had to move to either Xylinx or Altera. Why we choose Altera was because of AHDL. Moving from ABEL to AHDL was a breeze. So natural. On the other had moving to VHDL had a learning and the compiler also cost a fortune at that time.

    Ever since there has been no looking back from AHDL. Our IP kept building upon AHDL with schematic and Verilog here and there. Support for AHDL, the Megaplugin Wizard or the LPM primitives had not been withering. Today we are in Quartus 20.1 and our device is Cyclone 10LP and we are quite happy, but for the chip non-availability.

    I have looked in Efinix. Their IP catalog is primitive. Platform Designer is non existent. Schematic entry is unheard off. One of our team mates commented, “we are anyway out of work. Instead of porting our design to vendor neutral code, we can as well design an open source AHDL plugin or a brand new Platform Designer for Efinix!!”

    Jokes apart, Altera tools are great. So please give me some IC’s