I've heard this so many times that I've grown tired of it. The "$15 in quantity" claim from Xilinx and other FPGA manufacturers. Yes, it is quite likely that af

I've heard this so many times that I've grown tired of it. The "$15 in quantity" claim from Xilinx and other FPGA manufacturers. Yes, it is quite likely that after 2 years your order of 100,000 units (first batch in a larger 500k schedule, of course) will eventually reach that mythical $15. I've learned to design things using my local distributor as a pricing source. I use Farnell and look at their qty 10 pricing. That, together with the fact that a part is available at all, is a good indicator: I know I can get the pricing down at least 40% if I achieve quantity. And I have my feet firmly planted on earth. So, that Zynq chip? Farnell doesn't stock it at all, and findchips shows one source, beginning at $105 per chip. Ouch. I realize hackers enjoy tinkering with FPGAs, but for most practical applications in this power/performance range you'd be much better off with a Freescale i.MX6, those begin at $15 (quantity 10) and $42 will buy you a quad-core. Those chips have loads of peripherals, pretty much anything you can think of, and pretty impressive graphics accelerators. Which means you end up using pre-designed, tested and documented subsystems instead of developing your own logic.