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> They have better tools, documentation, and support than Gowin, who is a recent Chinese FPGA upstart using stolen Lattice IP and hires. Naive of me to ask, bu
by hobo_mark 3y ago
> They have better tools, documentation, and support than Gowin, who is a recent Chinese FPGA upstart using stolen Lattice IP and hires.
Naive of me to ask, but how are they allowed to sell anywhere outside of China?
- sitkack 3y ago> stolen Lattice IP and hires If this is true, then the bitstream for Gowin and Lattice parts would be similar and both are being actively reverse engineered to be supported by OSS tools. It would be nice to see more evidence of this.
- padf 3y agoI don't think there is any evidence of this. Open Source tools fully support Lattice (low end) FPGAs, and support for Gowin FPGAs is not quite as mature. It seems that many of the initial FPGA patents have expired, and that's why many small FPGA vendors are appearing. Please correct me if I am wrong.
- sitkack 3y agoI agree. IP theft is a bold claim, that is why I was asking for more citations. Not only are the patent expired, but there are three projects that generate FPGA fabrics programmatically. FPGAs are extremely easy to construct as they are a repeating lattice.