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Renesas enters FPGA market with the first ultra-low-power, low-cost family
- teruakohatu 5y agoWhat kind of applications are these very low cost, low gate, FPGAs used for?
- guerrilla 5y agoNot an EE but I know exactly what I'm going to use these for: Playing with old CPUs so that I can implement all the bus and decode logic and some peripherals in it. Something like this[1] but even simpler. They'll probably be used for similar but more realistic stuff, i.e. as reconfigurable glue. 1. http://www.mattmillman.com/projects/8od/ http://www.mattmillman.com/projects/8od/
- d_tr 5y agoWhy not simply get one of the many cheap development boards that are available right now and with much larger FPGAs instead of waiting an unspecified amount of time for these? These devices are painfully small for something like this and it is not clear whether they have any hard adders and multipliers.
- CyberRabbi 5y agoProbably custom high speed interconnect or glue logic that cheap MCUs cannot do. This is in relatively high demand given the current chip shortage. If this can do in-circuit programming, it’s huge.
- londons_explore 5y agoHooking up two otherwise incompatible busses. For example, say you want to connect an SPI flash device to something that only supports NAND flash - you might use one of these FPGA's to act as a kind of converter.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ncmncm 5y agoAnd, what rate can you clock them at? You can use these to replace a microcontroller doing a simple job it was not fast enough for, or burned too much power for, or you can't buy any of just now. It feels funny to write this, because we used to say you could put a microcontroller in, in place of custom logic if it was fast enough. The best 6502 project I have seen put an 80MHz microcontroller on a 40-pin DIP format board, that bit-bangs out a 6502 on the pins. It has enough RAM to copy 64k in and execute from, where timing isn't critical.
- jacquesm 5y agoThat sounds like a fun project.
- linker3000 5y agoHere's a Z80 variant: https://j4f.info/z80-mbc2 https://j4f.info/z80-mbc2 Fabio has also done boards for the NEC V20 and 68K
- jacquesm 5y agoWhat a clean design. I wished my 'daily driver' had such easy interface options for hardware.
- snvzz 5y ago>And, what rate can you clock them at? High occupation projects on iCE40 LP1K (closest thing) easily clock 70-100MHz in my experience.
- ncmncm 5y agoWe can guess, but that seems pointless.
- lnsru 5y agoLook at Lattice’s marketing material. They have tons of applications covered. Mostly protocol converters, level shifters, all sort of glue logic, gate drivers an so on.
- phire 5y agoOne real world example: The pebble time used a small FPGA to act as a display controller for their custom ePaper-like color LCD display. Allowed them to interface with the non-standard display on a cheap off the shelf microcontroller, without having to waste power bitbanging. As a bonus, the bitstream also included the startup splash screen which would show instantly, before the cpu even got around to initializing the display controller.
- desdiv 5y ago>The pebble time used a small FPGA to act as a display controller for their custom ePaper-like color LCD display. Minor correction: the pebble time uses a standard off-the-shelf Sharp Memory LCD display[0]. These displays are commonly used on smart watches so they're not propriety to Pebble. Sharp ships these displays as complete modules, with all control logic built-in, so you just need to supply power and serial commands to drive them. Any standard microcontroller can drive these. You're right that Pebble chose to put an FPGA between their main microcontroller and the Sharp Memory LCD though. [0] https://www.sharpmemorylcd.com/ https://www.sharpmemorylcd.com/
- Fred27 5y agoI know it's probably not critical to their bottom line, but I hope some variants come in a hobbist solderable package - QFP or at least QFN.
- amock 5y agoFrom the design software: Package: QFN-24 Supported Development Platforms: • ForgeFPGA Development Board + ForgeFPGA Socket Adapter #1 Description: The SLG47910V provides a small, low power component for common FPGA applications. The user creates their circuit design by programming the One-Time Programmable (OTP) Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) to configure the interconnect logic, the IO pins, and the Macrocells of the SLG47910V. This highly versatile device allows a wide variety of FPGA applications to be designed within a very small, low power integrated circuit. The macrocells in the device include the following: • Dense Logic Array: ◦ Equivalent to 900 4-bit LUTs; ◦ 1.8 k DFFs; ◦ 5 kb distributed memory; ◦ 32 kb BRAM; ◦ Configurable through NVM and/or SPI interface; • 50 MHz High-frequency Oscillator: ◦ 3.41 MHz Low-power mode; • Phase-locked Loop (PLL): ◦ Input from external source or internal oscillators; • Power Supply: ◦ VDDIO: 1.71 V to 3.6 V; ◦ VDDCore: 1.1 V ± 10%; • Power-On-Reset (POR);
- arcticbull 5y agoOh this is very cool! The market deserves some competition.
- CamperBob2 5y agoEspecially considering how fucked Xilinx and Altera customers are these days. Now's the best possible time for competitors to hit the market hard.
- lnsru 5y agoNor Lattice, nor these guys can compete with Xilinx and Altera (or AMD and Intel as they are called nowadays). Lattice’s portfolio ends where Xilinx starts. So absolutely no overlapping and therefore no competition.
- themulticaster 5y ago> Lattice’s portfolio ends where Xilinx starts. Sorry for nitpicking, but there is some overlap when looking at the high-end Lattice FPGA offerings, e.g. ECP3 with >500 IO and ~150k LUTs in its top configuration (the usual caveats apply regarding comparing LUT counts from different FPGA designs).
- m3kw9 5y agoLattice will go big on the LUT when their advant platform comes online
- lnsru 5y agoThanks, it is very promising indeed. Just found their press release.
- mastax 5y agoLooking on DigiKey there is almost no supply of the GreenPak devices that are being rebranded/supplanted. Which is a shame because these look really neat.
- noncoml 5y agoIf their tools are anywhere close to decent, it would be an instant success
- bpye 5y agoThese are being made by Dialog and looking at the tools appear to be a relative of the GreenPAK devices. They were essentially very very small mixed signal programmable logic devices but the data sheets detailed every bit in the bitstream. With any luck these new parts will be the same. They are already using Yosys for synthesis.
- callmemclovin 5y agoOh that's some nice info, with their low price point (around 0.25$ for the low-end ones) the GreenPAK devices appeared to me like a gamechanger in the making. I hope they gain more traction in the future.
- phendrenad2 5y agoExactly, but I've given up on hardware companies ever making a good software product. I think that hardware companies are full of hardware engineers who made a little Javascript app once, and who assume that making software is easy. And they promote from within, so suddenly your software team is run and operated by people who made a Javascript app once.
- sneeeeeed 5y agoThe tools are claimed to be Free with a capital F, is this really true?
- sanxiyn 5y agoI don't see any reason to doubt. ForgeFPGA is said to be successor of GreenPAK, and GreenPAK tools are capital F free. Get it from https://github.com/azonenberg/openfpga https://github.com/azonenberg/openfpga.
- floatboth 5y agoThese aren't official vendor tools.
- londons_explore 5y agoIt's really surprising for any player in the IC design world to publish anything using free software. Normally the software is proprietary and costs $10k/seat/year at a minimum.
- dev_tty01 5y ago$10K/seat/year? That's a fantasy. Maybe if you just want to look at a schematic. As soon as you start actually doing something useful the price per seat goes way up.
- fwip 5y ago"at a minimum."
- Lramseyer 5y agoYou're not wrong, but it's important to keep in mind that for more complicated FPGAs, they have hard IP blocks in them often supplied by other companies. Also consider that when these IPs have errata in them, they can sometimes be worked around with FPGA soft logic. Oh, and parts of the software are supplied by companies like Synopsys. As far as I am concerned though, Synopsys is essentially Autodesk, and Blender is taking over!
- numlock86 5y agoI hope they get that stuff on par with the rest of the Renesas quality quickly. So far I've been very skeptical about the whole Dialog acquisition. Plus Silego is a whole different story altogether ...
- londons_explore 5y agoI wonder if it will have any block rams? If so, it becomes big enough for mini CPU cores. Little CPU cores enable far more usecases - for example "upload this thing to a server via ethernet" isn't practical with 5000 gates of hardware logic, but a CPU core with 2kbytes of block ram and a little hardware logic on the side makes that kind of thing practical.
- lnsru 5y agoWhy don’t you want to buy classical microcontroller for such task? It’s cheaper, has more performance and faster development time. FPGA area is higher for a CPU softcore compared to a normal silicon CPU.
- AussieWog93 5y agoNot sure about GP's specific case with Ethernet, but for some tasks that "little hardware logic on the side" can be the difference between some bit-banging operation taking one clock cycle vs. 200.
- mschuster91 5y agoBecause of supply chain issues, for one.
- lnsru 5y agoIs this chip somehow special and prone to supply chain issues? I am just curious. Edit: I get tons of marketing materials daily about new various electric components. Fun thing is that while marketing department is sending advertising I can buy the parts mostly only in 2023.
- CuriousCosmic 5y agoThere are plenty of cases where the sequential logic for an FPGA may end up resulting in something looking like a custom CPU implementation. Development wise it may end up cheaper to just pick up an existing architecture and build in custom instructions for the specific parts that make it particularly expensive (either computationally or latency wise) for a traditional CPU.
- jiggawatts 5y agoI'm not an industry expert, but I wonder if this product is aimed at customers that have been hit hard by the electronic parts supply chain problems. If you have some small IC doing some simple digital logic, and the SKU is sold out, that 50c part could prevent you shipping a $200K luxury car or whatever. Throw in this FPGA, program it to emulate the part, and you can keep shipping your products. Little daughter-boards can overcome any pinout, voltage differences, or whatever. From what I've heard, if some specific IC is out-of-stock, all of the compatible ones are also likely to be out-of-stock. Even if you scrounge up some compatible parts, next month you might run out of some other IC. It's like whack-a-mole in some industries. With something like this, at least in principle you could order one generic "gap filler" part and cover your bases, at least to a degree.
- rcxdude 5y agoIt's fairly rare to see a 'simple digitial logic' chip on a PCB nowadays. In no small part because even entire microprocessors are mostly cost-limited by packaging and placing on the board, not the cost of silicon. So anything that even a small number of customers want to do in digital logic gets adsorbed into either the microprocessor or the peripheral.
- bradfa 5y agoI think it very much depends on what market you're looking at. Often times on designs I've worked on there's a whole pile of logic gates and other simple discrete circuits which help to do housekeeping type tasks, like synchronizing power-up/down or reset circuits. Often the specialized sequencer chips are VERY expensive so a handful of discrete logic gets thrown at the problem. If you could replace a square inch of discrete logic which handles power-up/down and resets with a $0.50 FPGA you can program such that you can even better control your design and even maybe match better what the power-up/down or reset sequence should be, that's going to be an interesting thing to watch in the market.
- monocasa 5y agoCan confirm, have used MachXO chips in that space before. Despite the marketing literature, they're full FPGAs, not CPLDs.
- nrclark 5y agoFor any Renesas folks reading this, you should consider throwing in with the open-source Icestorm toolchain. Icestorm brought a ton of exposure to Lattice's low-end FPGAs, and that was with no official support from Lattice. Renesas could have that too. If you have to spend money on software anyways, why not spend it improving the overall ecosystem? The marketing impact could be huge for getting the word out to designers like me that hate the big-names' toolchains.
- detaro 5y agoThey use yosys apparently.
- nrclark 5y agoNice! What about place/route?
- detaro 5y agoNot sure, just saw a screenshot of their tooling somewhere with yosys output showing, didn't have time to poke around myself yet.
- Rochus 5y agohttps://hdl.github.io/awesome/items/vpr/ https://hdl.github.io/awesome/items/vpr/ https://github.com/YosysHQ/nextpnr https://github.com/YosysHQ/nextpnr
- moring 5y agoThere is no mention on those pages on whether Renesas uses those tools.
- monocasa 5y agoHere's hoping they open source their modifications.
- xvilka 5y ago
- tommiegannert 5y agoNeat. Need to wait a bit longer: > The first ForgeFPGA device, the 1K LUT offering, is expected to be available in production quantities in Q2 2022. Interested designers can visit https://www.dialog-semiconductor.com/products/greenpak/low-power-low-cost-forgefpga https://www.dialog-semiconductor.com/products/greenpak/low-p... to find out more. > * Very low power as low as 20 microamps standby > * Very low price in volume of well under US$ 0.50 > * Free, downloadable software with no license fees that includes both schematic capture and HDL modes And the bold statement > * Proven ability to deliver very high volumes I wonder if they've concluded that the semiconductor squeeze will be on its way out in Q2, so this is really a PR stunt.
- numlock86 5y ago> I wonder if they've concluded that the semiconductor squeeze will be on its way out in Q2, so this is really a PR stunt. Q2 of what year, though? STM keeps reporting me no deliveries until Q2/2023. I had to buy $.80 chips at brokers for $35 and other silly things lately, just to keep my product in the marked. And that was just the remaining low volume of usually less than 200 pieces per broker deal. Almost the same horror with NXP. With Renesas so far I could just order another 50k pieces here and another 200k pieces there and they just kept (or rather keep) delivering. I wouldn't just call it a bold statement.
- zokier 5y ago> I wonder if they've concluded that the semiconductor squeeze will be on its way out in Q2, so this is really a PR stunt. Renesas has significant amount of their own fabs, so it might be bit more than just PR stunt. Although I don't know if these ex-Dialog parts would be produced in Renesas fabs or some other place. And last I checked they are still the biggest microcontroller supplier in the world, so they probably know their field.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Traster 5y agoI wonder how the economics work for this - it's great to have cheap FPGAs like this, but I suspect Renesas will need to produce a lot of IPs for people to use on these devices. With a cheap FPGA device like this you need quite big scale before this starts to beat a more expensive chip since you're going to have to going to have to get an FPGA developer to write your IP and that's going to be atleast in the region of tens of thousands in dev cost. It was always the problem that the big fpga companies ran into - at small scale the development costs are prohibitive, at large scale the unit costs lend themselves to custom asic production. The result is you're constantly chasing this mid-scale niche, pushing at the boundaries by pushing your process advantage vs custom ASIC and by pushing the tooling to lower the cost of development - neither of which proved to be very successful.
- joezydeco 5y agoI always cast a wary eye towards new Renesas parts. I got burned on the RZ/A line. It was a promising part. Low cost Cortex-A9 with DRAM on the die that could run Linux XIP off of the SoC when combined with a cheap QSPI NOR flash. But the software was just undercooked and undersupported. When I could finally get an FAE in house to assist he explained that the Mitsu and Hitachi houses still didn't get along and it was nearly impossible to get stateside assistance. There was one single person in the USA responsible for Linux BSP support. So yeah nice hardware but no, don't count on the software to be there on time.
- marcodiego 5y agoSymbiflow compatibility?
- kown7 5y agoDoes that even fit a small RISC-V processor?
- monocasa 5y agoIt's not meant to.
- ignaloidas 5y agoThe smallest RISC-V processor for FPGAs that I know of[0] needs 1.2K LUTs on ice40 FPGAs, so maybe barely [0]: https://github.com/BrunoLevy/learn-fpga/tree/master/FemtoRV https://github.com/BrunoLevy/learn-fpga/tree/master/FemtoRV