[TriEmbed] Lattice FPGA Development Kit

[Kevin Schilf]

Hi TriEmbed,
This is a shameless attempt at gathering marketing data...  :-)
I am putting together a FPGA development board with a Lattice FPGA.

Why choose a FPGA over a micro you say?  Good question.  FPGA's are more expensive and less fuel efficient than their micro cousins but offer:
- Higher throughput- The ability to create multiple parallel processing blocks.- Numerous I/O standards with more precise timing.
If you don't need one of these three things you are probably better in a micro; although, I would never say no to a FPGA solution.  :-)

Possibilities -
HW Interfaces- Trusty GPIO of course up to about 1 Gbps, differential standards as such LVDS over 1 Gbps, high speed SerDes (serializer / deserializer) with bit rates up to several Gbps (PCIe, Ethernet, JESD, etc.)
Soft Processor - Avoiding the expensive license fees associated with ARM, RISC-V is an open source Instruction set processor out of Berkeley.  Not only can you program the processor but you can change the opcodes by implementing custom instructions in the FPGA's fabric.  Linux is available.  This is a very exciting possibility  :-)

IP - baseline RTL (Verilog or VHDL) code to implement certain functionality, video processing, motor control, DSP, etc.  This is the secret sauce of the FPGA, but I am looking for building blocks that could be created in advance and absorbed into more sophisticated solutions to ease getting started.

Price - What is a reasonable price point in a professional, research, or academic setting?

The key to success if providing a thoughtful piece of hardware WITH documentation and sample code that makes it useful out of the box.  There are enough PCB paperweights in the world already.  :-)

I look forward to your input.  Thank you for your time.
Kevin S
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.triembed.org/pipermail/triembed_triembed.org/attachments/20230820/a6d1dda6/attachment.htm>