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Renesas introduces sub 50 cents FPGA family with Yosys-based development tools
- rektide 5y ago5 days ago, 84 comments, a lot a lot a lot of skepticism against this company's ability to stay on a good path, not mess stuff up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29261574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29261574 here's to hoping! very good that they're trying to leverage public tooling/infrastructure. definitely an area that, with more competition, could reinvigorate & revitalize computing in powerful ways... especially if we start seeing more competition that also has high speed io too, imo, not quite present here at this ultra low price point. the greenpak line seemed super super cool though. really cool ideas & products, way more mixed signal in a tiny cheap package than a classic fpga would have. i have little idea how capable or not it really is, given that it's a truly tiny product. but even if this never becomes a hundreds of cell line with decent io, it still feels like it has a ton going for it, and i hope it remains actively developed, very much, especially if communal tool chains get to play.
- Rochus 5y agoIt was not known then if and how open-source tools would be used.
- detaro 5y agothe comments there already mention that yosys is used, and this article does not go into any more detail about that.
- Rochus 5y agoThere were hopes and assumptions. A comment with specific facts was added two days ago, I just saw it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29292603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29292603
- sneak 5y agoSlightly offtopic, but perhaps someone here can shed some light: What are the best hobbyist use cases for FPGAs? Most of the stuff I do can be accomplished with microcontrollers or embedded systems like RPi, I imagine FPGAs become more important when you're doing things like DSP or hard realtime requirements, which don't come up super often in hobbyist projects. I'd like to do more hobby projects involving FPGAs so what sorts of things might low cost FPGAs be useful for in that realm? I'm thinking of building a clock that integrates a local atomic oscillator, outputs from an embedded system running ntpd, and drives a local VFD as a sort of orientation project.
- yummypaint 5y agoA quick example might be a device which outputs a channel of audio per pin using super fast pwm
- johndoughy 5y agoI'm using an ice40 FPGA to make a camera. It reads an image from an image sensor, writes it to an SDRAM, and then writes the SDRAM content to an SD card. Doing all that with a regular CPU would require lots of specialized peripherals (especially since the data rate is 1.2 Gbps -- 12 bits per pixel @ 100 MHz). An FPGA can handle all the requirements quite well.
- yummypaint 5y agoAnother quick idea is a cnc positioning stage that uses optical interfrerometry to measure distance moved. Really anything involving fast fringe counting in an interference pattern. It might be something like a new fringe for every micron of movement, so tracking something moving 1 m/s will require fringe counting at about 1 MHz, and the ADC sampling rate will need to be several times this in practice because errors are cumulative.
- milesvp 5y agoThe single most popular hobby use case may be the Mister project for near perfect, super low latency retro gaming emulation. Another common use case is real time video stream manipulation. There is a demo by Bunnie Huang who uses an fpga to intercept, decode, then reencode HDMI video streams (including microsecond timing manipulation of one of the data lines) in order to do video overlays on the video (for things like captions). In general the main use cases are really for things that require lots of parallel and/or low latency processing.
- marcodiego 5y agoGCC brought good compilers out of the shackles of the proprietary world. Linux did the same for UNIX users. A few years later, Arduino did the same with micro controllers. Now is the time for FPGA.