Licensing Scheme, Please Clarify or Eliminate it.

The Cyclone II devices can be programmed using Quartus web edition = $0.

The simple version of the NIOS II core is free. There are other CPU options on OpenCores that are free.

The basic IP cores are all free, i.e., the FPGA logic that is vendor-optimized, eg., counters, RAM, IOE element features.

What IP do you need above-and-beyond these?

For pricing, you need to talk to an Arrow FAE, or one of the other distributors for Altera devices.

Cheers,

Dave

Hello,

The pages you are looking for do exist, or at least they do for the US.

Quartus II: http://www.altera.com/buy/software/buy-software.html

IP-NIOS for Nios II/f and Nios II/s: http://www.altera.com/devices/processor/nios2/ipsuite/ni2-ip-suite.html

Nios II/e is free as shown here: http://www.altera.com/devices/processor/nios2/cores/economy/ni2-economy-core.html

Megacore: Depends on the core but many are free as Dave indicated

The free Web Edition includes all Cyclone families except the first. This file shows what's included with each version: http://www.altera.com/literature/po/ss_quartussevswe.pdf

I would agree that the chips are awesome. They've come a long way since Cyclone II, increasing performance and density while driving down costs. It might be worth it to take a peek at the later Cyclone families.

Have fun!

Hi,

there are also a lot of free cores at opencores.org, while their usage sometimes depends on the intended "target" application (market). Some cores are not intended for commercial usage, some interfaces or functions are also to be licensed for commercial use by their legal "inventors" (e.g. CAN, EtherCAT, ...). Free implementations are limited to testing, but using those for commercial desings would not be allowed. For commercial designs there may be also compatibility issues, e.g. writing a functional CAN core based on the published specification is one task, but having this completely tested against the specification to official declare the design "CAN-compliant" is the other side of the medal...

But in either case - I think the current policy to provide the free of charge Quartus II webedition and also one version of the NIOS II core for free with options for IP cores (free / evaluation version for test / opencores,..) is (for me) more attractive rather increasing the chip price to "obtain" licenses for function I do not need...

Different "bundles" of chip and licenses would result in a non-manageable number of different order codes and honestly, would this differ in the end?

Thanks all for your decent replies!

I appreciate you pointing to the pages wit the prices and to opencores.org.

So for a more or less basic commercial control system, we have:

QuartusII subscription: $3000

NiosII license: $500

---------

$3500

I still think amortizing the cost over the order volumes would make the thing more seamless. For example, in my company we would order about 2000 chips per year (we make medium size machines), and could easily pay an extra $1+ per. Whereas a high-volume manufacturer could just pay $0.10 extra.

Yeah there's a penalty for stuff you don't use, but all other things being equal, this gets rid of all the hassle, saving precious hours for actual project development.

The Xilinx FAE was here today and spent an hour showing us all the equivalent stuff, so we could compare.

It seems their EDK with the microBlaze only cost $600 to license.

I don't mean to sound like small potatoes here, but it's almost a 3k difference, although this is probably really being passed on to the chip cost; I still need to better compare equivalent chips.

One thing they don't have is the visual schematic design like the Quartus', but their IDE has a wizard too that creates the VHDL snippets, which is not too bad.

I love Altera :cry:, but for now it seems it's going to be Altera for my pet projects, and Xilinx for my work projects.

Thanks all again! :)

Hi there,

do you use a FPGA that is not covered by the WebEdition?

In case your chip is covered by the WebEdition and you do not need the extra features of the Subscription Edition as e.g. Logic Lock, ... I'm quite sure (ok, not 100%) that you can license the NIOSII and still use the WebEdition. This shrinks your NRC to $500...

Maybe worth checking or thinking about?

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For example, in my company we would order about 2000 chips per year

--- Quote End ---

If those chips are Cyclone devices you do not need a subscription edition license.

--- Quote Start ---

The Xilinx FAE was here today and spent an hour showing us all the equivalent stuff, so we could compare.

It seems their EDK with the microBlaze only cost $600 to license.

--- Quote End ---

And what version of the EDK was this? You should be asking the price of ISE or Vivado. I think you'll find its price is comparable to Altera ... they are in direct competition.

I suspect in either case, you could get by with Quartus Web Edition for Cyclone designs and ISE Web Edition for Spartan designs, so the only thing you should compare is the soft-core processor IP (if that is what you really need). Personally I have created numerous FPGA designs, and an external processor is always significantly cheaper in terms of resource usage and cost, eg., 500MHz PowerPC devices or 700MHz ARM devices are $5 to $20 (TI ARM Sitara, Freescale MPC8308).

Cheers,

Dave

Aha, thanks for the clarification guys, I do remember reading somewhere about the cyclone not needing the subscription license. Then the NiosII for $500 is pretty reasonable.

Our local Altera FAE is coming over tomorrow, so hopefully he will confirm this and clarify the

road-map for us. It's awesome.

Thanks everybody!

Hi there,

well that case it was worth spending some minutes to post the question here, wasn't it?

Best regards :-)