Licensing Scheme, Please Clarify or Eliminate it.

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

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

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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.

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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