4 ms·

Maybe $5-10k?

gaudat 2y ago
Do you need latency measured in nanoseconds or multiplexing hundreds of sensors? Otherwise it makes a lot more sense to use a Cortex-M or Cortex-A.
- user_7832 2y ago
  Aren't FPGAs also helpful for high bandwidth/throughput applications like continuous input from a camera? (I'm not an FPGA expert, just curious)
  - schobi 2y ago
    Right. Fpgas shine if you have high data rates (multi Gigabit on single/dual pins), low latency, lots of similar computation (multiply accumulate), a lot of complex pipelined logic and if you need to be really compact at the same time. The effort to get this running is also crazy huge. Large designs "compile" for hours, simulation and in situ testing can take months. If your fpga has 1000 pins, even PCB design, manufacturing and debugging is hard, if you even have a sufficient scope at hand. I would guess 10x compared to solving a problem with an embedded cpu, which is 10x compared to solving a problem on a standard PC. Expect another 10x if you go from Fpga to custom ASICs. I'm curious what could be expected / possible with 5-10k. Tweaking an existing design, on proven and available hardware? Testbench for a module only? Maybe "just" VHDL/verilog coding (instead of dealing with the Fpga)? (sorry, no marketplace)
  - jononor 2y ago
    Many of the common usecases, like camera input, will have dedicated peripheral a available in a System on Chip or microcontroller. Which would then generally be preferred over FPGA because it will require less custom development, quality assurance, etc.
    - user_7832 2y ago
      That's true, I was thinking of the more "extreme" use cases like those cameras which sample at hundreds (thousands?) of images a second.
      - ckemere 2y ago
        In this case, my maximum data rate is about ~256 Mbit. So not crazy, but not microcontroller either.
gchadwick 2y ago
Does depend upon the project but I suspect this is far too low. Only thing you're likely to get in this price range is a small addition / tweak to an existing design. A very minimal design from scratch that uses existing off the shelf hardware with no interfacing to anything remotely complex and no follow on support (pretty much developer hands it over showing some smoke test works and you're on your own from there) could also fit into this budget.
toast0 2y ago
Here's your engineering plan for that budget. Make up some design documents and put up a splashy crowdsourcing campaign. Collect, but don't spend the deposits. Trickle out some progress content over about a year. Look for knock offs on aliexpress, return deposits.
bcrl 2y ago
So you want to pay for less than 1 week of dev time? Almost nothing can be done on an FPGA for that little amount of money beyond the smallest of changes to an existing design. Heck, the cost of simply getting your completed circuit board with the FPGA tested by an engineering firm that gives you the required FCC certification before you can ship your product starts at $10k. Realistically you need a bare minimum of $50k to bring a simple commercial hardware project to market when you understand the niche and already have the ability to deliver the firmware and software without significant external (paid) effort. I took the time (and it takes time) to learn a bit about FPGAs (playing around with 1Gbps and 10Gbps ethernet as well as PCIe 1.0 x1 and 3.0 x4), and if you want to actually do something new, there is a lot of time to spend on learning the various protocols a given design will touch or implement. Most of the sample code on $vendor's website is shoddily thrown together and breaks as soon as you breath on it wrong. When you do anything interesting with networking protocols the constraints of clock speed and bandwidth make things extremely complicated with oodles of corner cases as you do things like use wide busses at low clock speeds where packets can start at multiple offsets in the bus. You can build on top of something like the NetFPGA project, but that only works if what you're building is close to an existing well known niche. But if you're just flinging packets, there are far less costly (especially in time) frameworks to play around with things. I'd say away from building custom FPGA based hardware until the performance benefit will increase sales a factor of 100-1000x (depending on complexity) to cover the cost of the hardware. But keep in mind that it's harder and harder to compete with commodity x86 servers. In the past, every cell phone base station used FPGAs to do the signal processing. Today's 5G networks do most of the signal processing on servers because you can do cool things like noise cancellation across nearby antennas when all the data is in the same place, and the software developers to produce those changes are going to cost far less than a team of the size needed to support the same rate of change on an FPGA.
- CuriousCosmic 2y ago
  They never mentioned building custom hardware anywhere and tbh I don't see why you would need to when reasonably cheap FPGA hardware already exists. Alinx provides a bunch of cheap FPGA development platforms including SOMs that you can use with custom boards without needing to design the whole thing from scratch. I'm willing to bet that unless they are doing something particularly exotic, they can probably complete their project using COTS parts without a single custom piece of hardware.
mmdesignsldn22 2y ago
Would you be open to send more than $10k? I have few talented engineers within my dev shop.

Maybe $5-10k?

Do you need latency measured in nanoseconds or multiplexing hundreds of sensors? Otherwise it makes a lot more sense to use a Cortex-M or Cortex-A.

user_7832 2y ago
Aren't FPGAs also helpful for high bandwidth/throughput applications like continuous input from a camera? (I'm not an FPGA expert, just curious)
- schobi 2y ago
  Right. Fpgas shine if you have high data rates (multi Gigabit on single/dual pins), low latency, lots of similar computation (multiply accumulate), a lot of complex pipelined logic and if you need to be really compact at the same time. The effort to get this running is also crazy huge. Large designs "compile" for hours, simulation and in situ testing can take months. If your fpga has 1000 pins, even PCB design, manufacturing and debugging is hard, if you even have a sufficient scope at hand. I would guess 10x compared to solving a problem with an embedded cpu, which is 10x compared to solving a problem on a standard PC. Expect another 10x if you go from Fpga to custom ASICs. I'm curious what could be expected / possible with 5-10k. Tweaking an existing design, on proven and available hardware? Testbench for a module only? Maybe "just" VHDL/verilog coding (instead of dealing with the Fpga)? (sorry, no marketplace)
- jononor 2y ago
  Many of the common usecases, like camera input, will have dedicated peripheral a available in a System on Chip or microcontroller. Which would then generally be preferred over FPGA because it will require less custom development, quality assurance, etc.
  - user_7832 2y ago
    That's true, I was thinking of the more "extreme" use cases like those cameras which sample at hundreds (thousands?) of images a second.
    - ckemere 2y ago
      In this case, my maximum data rate is about ~256 Mbit. So not crazy, but not microcontroller either.

gchadwick 2y ago

Does depend upon the project but I suspect this is far too low. Only thing you're likely to get in this price range is a small addition / tweak to an existing design. A very minimal design from scratch that uses existing off the shelf hardware with no interfacing to anything remotely complex and no follow on support (pretty much developer hands it over showing some smoke test works and you're on your own from there) could also fit into this budget.

toast0 2y ago

Here's your engineering plan for that budget. Make up some design documents and put up a splashy crowdsourcing campaign. Collect, but don't spend the deposits. Trickle out some progress content over about a year. Look for knock offs on aliexpress, return deposits.

bcrl 2y ago

So you want to pay for less than 1 week of dev time? Almost nothing can be done on an FPGA for that little amount of money beyond the smallest of changes to an existing design. Heck, the cost of simply getting your completed circuit board with the FPGA tested by an engineering firm that gives you the required FCC certification before you can ship your product starts at $10k. Realistically you need a bare minimum of $50k to bring a simple commercial hardware project to market when you understand the niche and already have the ability to deliver the firmware and software without significant external (paid) effort. I took the time (and it takes time) to learn a bit about FPGAs (playing around with 1Gbps and 10Gbps ethernet as well as PCIe 1.0 x1 and 3.0 x4), and if you want to actually do something new, there is a lot of time to spend on learning the various protocols a given design will touch or implement. Most of the sample code on $vendor's website is shoddily thrown together and breaks as soon as you breath on it wrong. When you do anything interesting with networking protocols the constraints of clock speed and bandwidth make things extremely complicated with oodles of corner cases as you do things like use wide busses at low clock speeds where packets can start at multiple offsets in the bus. You can build on top of something like the NetFPGA project, but that only works if what you're building is close to an existing well known niche. But if you're just flinging packets, there are far less costly (especially in time) frameworks to play around with things. I'd say away from building custom FPGA based hardware until the performance benefit will increase sales a factor of 100-1000x (depending on complexity) to cover the cost of the hardware. But keep in mind that it's harder and harder to compete with commodity x86 servers. In the past, every cell phone base station used FPGAs to do the signal processing. Today's 5G networks do most of the signal processing on servers because you can do cool things like noise cancellation across nearby antennas when all the data is in the same place, and the software developers to produce those changes are going to cost far less than a team of the size needed to support the same rate of change on an FPGA.

CuriousCosmic 2y ago
They never mentioned building custom hardware anywhere and tbh I don't see why you would need to when reasonably cheap FPGA hardware already exists. Alinx provides a bunch of cheap FPGA development platforms including SOMs that you can use with custom boards without needing to design the whole thing from scratch. I'm willing to bet that unless they are doing something particularly exotic, they can probably complete their project using COTS parts without a single custom piece of hardware.

mmdesignsldn22 2y ago

Would you be open to send more than $10k? I have few talented engineers within my dev shop.