New Contributor
Occasional ContributorDon't think "migration" - always think "re-design", as this is only a similar FPGA family, but absolutely not similar enough to call the whole process of bringing the design into this decade a "migration".
The 256-ball BGA chip has way more IO pins, so you might be able to move some of the external logic (if there's any) into the chip, reducing a little bit of the cost that you will have for the more expensive PCB and the more expensive assembly process.
For the Quartus design, you should check what entry method was used: Is it Verilog, VHDL, schematic entry or even AHDL? I'd have to verify if AHDL (*.tdf files) is still supported by the latest Quartus, because I remember reading some note (long time ago) that AHDL is not recommended any more. In any case, it is *very* good news that yo have the Quartus files, so the contents of the FPGA will not have to be re-written; I'd expect it to be a few-days-job only if it's really using a depreciated entry method. Things that could make it faster would be a proper simulation, timing analysis and of course Verilog or VHDL sources. I expect that you will spend a lot more time re-designing the circuit board than compiling the design for the new chip.
You *will* need an FPGA guy to do the job. I'd consider hiring one to make sure that you don't end up in a year-long project where you find out step-by-step that you should have hired an expert from the start. There's a lot that can go wrong on your first design, and the kind of money you'll save on Cyclone 10 vs. Cyclone is easily wasted on months of try-and-error.
I don't know if it's appropriate to offer this kind of help here in the Intel forums - if you're interested, just contact me through eMail: jens at icomp dot de. What you see on our web page is retro-computing products, but we also do contract work such as design of high-reliability devices, mostly in the telecommunications sector.
