Forum Discussion

Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
10 years ago

How many trsistors can I emulate with an EP2C5T144?

Hi,

I was considering purchasing an EP2C5T144 eval board and I wanted to know how many transistors can I emulate on the chip?

My purpose for the interest in the Cyclone II family is that I would like to implement neural networks on the chip and therefore would like to know if it will be able to emulate enough transistors for my project. I looked in the documentation but it seems to elude me as to how many actual logic gates are on each chip or on each LE. Some other manufacturers seem to state this on their chips but I don't want to name names or anything on your forum. I look forward to hearing from someone.

Thanks,

Kevin

1 Reply

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    10 years ago

    Hi,

    I don't think I can help with this particular question, but out of curiosity, why does transistor count matter for your application? All you can do, no matter what the FPGA manufacturer is, is to use the look-up-tables and the registers (and of course PLLs, on-chip memory and multipliers).

    Altera specifies very exactly how many of those are available. The EP2C5 has 4608 LEs (data sheet page 1-3), and each LE consits of a D-flip-flop, and a four-input LUT (data sheet page 2-6).

    I see that some competitors specify that number of system gates and equivalent logic cells, but in my eyes for most applications that is just irrelevant marketing-nonsense so that they can advertise huge numbers. Maybe you can do some ballpark estimations based on those numbers, but what typically matters is how many LUT/FF combinations you have ("LE", "slice", etc.), and how powerful those are (e.g. number of LUT inputs).

    If you really need the transistor count, you can probably either contact Altera, or maybe do some research on transistor or gate equivalents to estimate the number for that given FPGA.

    Best regards,

    GooGooCluster