6 ms·
Low-Power $5 FPGA Module
- sdrothrock 11y agoNot for sale, not available... wonder where this $5 price is coming from?
- thomasrossi 11y agoproduction cost maybe? But yea, I wonder too. Anyways, it would be really nice for mining strange algorithms, especially if at that "price"
- unwind 11y agoI (scare-)quoted the price in the title now, to indicate that it's not very certain. The FPGA in question seems to cost less than $2 here in Sweden in unit quantities (from Digi-Key: http://www.digikey.se/product-detail/en/ICE40UL1K-SWG16ITR50/220-1960-1-ND/5129490 http://www.digikey.se/product-detail/en/ICE40UL1K-SWG16ITR50...), so at least that component by itself doesn't have to blow up the parts cost.
- steckerbrett 11y agoNo, this is targeted towards consumer, mobile devices. For cryptographic use you want small process, high bin, typically extremely large and expensive chips. The thing has integrated LED drivers, it's about as far from what you want for that application as you can get.
- pjc50 11y agoQuite handy for covert data exfiltration by modulating a "power" LED, though.
- steckerbrett 11y agoProbably easier to use the GPIO in your micro controller to transmit it with RF, unless you've also designed a Faraday cage phone.
- Sanddancer 11y agoThe UART on this speaks IrDA natively, which would be a much more attractive target for covert exfiltration.
- zombees 11y agoice40UL1K is a $1.60 for a single bga unit on digikey. Probably well under a dollar wholesale. Add in a few cents for a crystal, some capacitors, pin headers, a vreg, and the pcb, probably costs $1-2 to produce. I should mention that someone capable of doing hobby level bga work could easily make their own at around $30 through a pcb batching service. In terms of electronic complexity, it looks pretty trivial.
- jacquesm 11y agoDidn't you mean $3?
- zombees 11y agoInstead of 30? No, it typically costs a lot to do one-off pcbs. Even through a batching service (where you share a large panel with other people), they'll still usually make you pay for a few of them. Also, all of the components are going to cost way more if you just want to buy one of each. Headers are tenths of a cent per pin but from digikey you'll probably have to buy a strip for a dollar or so. Likewise with crystals, vregs and caps.
- openchip 11y agoits 4 layer PCB with 275 micron via pad and 75 micron mechanical drill. I am not joking our PCB fab confirmed its doable technology for them.
- openchip 11y ago5USD is doable ball-park figure. Doable price even if using our own in-house manufacturing in Germany. Volume production in Asia can be way below of course.
- HappyTypist 11y agoNoteworthy limitation [1]: > The only gotcha is that the FPGA onchip memory is OTP, so it should either be loaded by external CPU over SPI, or from external SPI Flash, in both cases the SPI pins are user defined IO after bootstrap. Or then fixed configuration is burned into OTP. Basically, while it -may- retail for $5 you will need an external CPU or flash for it to work. This sounds like a heavily restrictive limitation. I'd rather pay for a $8 FPGA module with actual persistent memory. [2] https://hackaday.io/project/6592-dipsy https://hackaday.io/project/6592-dipsy
- raverbashing 11y agoI think you would be surprised to know a lot of the bigger FPGAs work exactly like that You usually need a serial flash with the data, or load it on device boot (no persistent memory)
- tcas 11y agoI think almost every FPGA is like that -- I think ones that have internal flash (like the Spartan-3AN) are still SRAM based and just have a flash chip in the package as well. The only flash based programmable logic from Xilinx/Altera are CPLDs as far as I remember. External SPI flash is pretty cheap even at low quantity (~$0.50 at qty 1 for 2Mbit, going down to the $0.30 range for low thousands)
- makomk 11y agoYeah, but FPGA dev boards usually have the required Flash chip integrated on the board rather than requiring you to supply your own.
- raverbashing 11y agoOf course. Because it's a dev board
- david-given 11y agoHow big is the bitstream for a device like this?
- pjc50 11y agoThe surge of interest appears to have killed Lattice Semi's website. Anyway, this is a fancy breakout board for a tiny BGA device: ice40UL1K. Available in single quantities from Digikey for under $2. I'm not sure what you'd do with this; at 1k LUTs you could probably just about fit an 8-bit microprocessor in there. Could you do crypto? You could get one or two AES implementations in: http://www.chesworkshop.org/ches2003/presentations/chodowiec_gaj.pdf http://www.chesworkshop.org/ches2003/presentations/chodowiec...
- zombees 11y agoI feel like its about time Lattice got some attention. Their development environment is way nicer for enthusiasts and it's usually pretty easy to use their stuff in projects. Xilinx by comparison only has free IDE support for some mid range SOCs (Zynq-7000) which tend to cost a lot on their own and the IDE is a living nightmare to use.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- vvanders 11y agoYup, I really like lattice's offerings.
- grandalf 11y agocan anyone recommend a good FPGA development kit to get started? I'm ultimately interested in SDR (dsp) and possibly finance applications, and would like to get familiar with the dev tools as I work on some hobby projects.
- rwmj 11y agoI remember the first PLD I used had 32 macrocells (in about 1991/1992). I could just about fit a single, simple state machine on it for talking to the VME bus.
- vonmoltke 11y ago
- rjsw 11y agoA former cow-orker has been selling a Xilinx version of this for years.
- openchip 11y agoxilinx in DIP8? Really? smallest coolrunner is qfn32 and that DOES not fit inside DIP8 footprint with through holes.. and coolrunner is so not cool, really.. I have done it all, :) doing it since 1979
- openchip 11y agono need for crystal, 10khz and 48mhz internal oscillator, and I do have some solution for the OTP use. Its a dowside, but it still amazing pastard. And yes AVR core fits nicely, I have done, and will port the old code from ice65 to iceultra. Yes volume pricing is below 1USD, and YES I have done commercial products with microcontroller with wholesale below 3 usd.. cheers Antti
- zombees 11y agoIt's worth noting that for a lot of applications (anything with UART for instance) you still want to use a crystal. Almost all of the micros on the market have an RC on die but it's usually better to just pop a crystal on the board. The PLL supports it, though you'll lose a couple precious pins.
- mmastrac 11y agoWhat speed can this run the AVR core at?
- openchip 11y agoI have done AVR in ICE65 but I do not recall the max clock I was able to achive. Internal clock is 48MHz, with some speed tweaking I guess a 4 clock-per instruction AVR core could work. But the beauty is that you can implement part of the "code" in real hardware.. or add custom instruction, or roll your own cpu..
- kam 11y agoThe use of the iCE40 family is exciting because there's a fully open source verilog to bitstream synthesis toolchain for the iCE40HX1K. https://github.com/cseed/arachne-pnr https://github.com/cseed/arachne-pnr http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/ http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/
- openchip 11y agocorrect, and we use link to icestorm with permission from our other ice based project. icestorm uses HX1K as main target, but porting to iceultra should be not an issue any more as almost all work is done.
- IshKebab 11y agoWhat's the target for a device like this? It doesn't seem powerful enough to replace a Cortex M4 for example - is it just if you want really really low power use?
- dragontamer 11y agoIf you use an FPGA like a CPU, its a waste of the FPGA. This FPGA will likely be used for implementing the variety of protocols in the embedded world. Imagine that you want to attach a Raspberry Pi camera to an arbitrary Cortex-M4... and the M4 doesn't support the interface. Instead of bit-banging the interface, you simply program the FPGA to handle that for you, and to trigger an interrupt whenever a full frame of data arrives. The spare CPU cycles are then used for sleep or maybe something else.
- pi-rat 11y agoTiny fpgas are sometimes used just to add a bit of glue logic next to a MCU. Or even just as reconfigurable routing for future-proofing a board. I've seen them as small as 600 logic blocks, which certainly isn't enough to do anything remotely advanced - but they're getting real cheap these days :)
- dragontamer 11y agoI definitely seen them used in that manner... but at only 8 pins (two of which are probably power), its hard for me to imagine good future-proofing in only 6-pins. I guess 28-pin CPLDs are already made though (Atmel ATF750C). But I really don't see how a 6-pin FPGA can be used for routing / future proofing.
- TerryADavis 11y agoI am nationalizing Intel and Microsoft under God's direct control through an divine oracle. God temple must be perfect. I am not interested in a new exotic and obscure platform. I am taking control of IBM PC compatible computers to direct along a path to perfection, home to God's temple. I am not interested in silly fring hardware. I am taking control of 400 million IBM PC desktops under the control of God's oracle.
- xt00 11y agoWith the small limitations of this, it is mostly a novelty--what makes it interesting is that most FPGA's are much more expensive than $5. So that's cool. Maybe you could implement a SPI slave to I2C transceiver or something like that -- something not so easy to do, but useful for a design. And yes, with only the OTP memory, the external EEPROM makes it more expensive. So at the end of the day, why not just buy a cheap micro for $0.75 with built-in flash, multiple blocks to do cool stuff, and if you are dead set on doing some FPGA type stuff, Cypress Semi has some psoc devices that have built-in logic blocks that are similar to FPGA macrocells.
- CCs 11y agoCombine it with C.H.I.P. [1] and you have a $14 supercomputer. The generic CPU could download over the air update (WiFi) and reprogram, take care of user interface etc while the FPGA can do the low-power, high throughput tasks (voice processing, video, image etc). [1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598272670/chip-the-worlds-first-9-computer/description https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598272670/chip-the-wor...
- analog31 11y agoAsk HN as an aside: What would be a good platform for learning how to use FPGA's, that's hobbyist priced? This would be for someone who is already experienced with electronics, microcontrollers, programming, etc.
- spiritplumber 11y agoThis looks like a fantastic replacement for a lot of microcontrollers that handle things like PWM sensors.
- openchip 11y agoits maybe not direct replacement of MCU, but more like addon on, customized peripheral that handles things that are too fast for software, examples could be: PWM input, i2c PWM controller, barcode emulation controller, nonstandard interface that need precise timing where software bitbang would eat too much cpu time.. etc.