Lattice FPGA & CPLD

[Cicada]

Hello

I want to pick your collective brains on this issue.

Lattice Semiconductor is running a special on it software development tool and connectivity IP suite.
http://bit.ly/2tgqNPh

I would like to know what Lattice's specialty is, i.e. what market? Telecoms, military etc. And what make them special i.e. low prices per gate etc. It seems that their focus is probably on communications equipment.

I am basically trying to find a motivation to spend the $198 dollar to purchase the products to learn the tools of a vendor other than Xilinx or Altera.

Does anyone have experience with this development environment? How is it? Can you contrast its positives and negatives relative to say Xilinx's tools.

Any comments are welcome.

[mikeselectricstuff]

This looks more about the IP blocks, which are probably similarly expensive from the competition.
The main Lattice Diamond SW is free, though again like the others you need to check which devices it supports and what other limitations there are with it.
If you do want to mess with Gbit ethernet, DDR3,PCIe etc. this looks like a very good deal (remember it's only a 1 year license though), though you may find that suitable devboards are fairly expensive.

ISTR Something that was fairly unique with Lattice was that it's the cheapest device that supports DDR3 wide enough to use commodity SODIMMs, which why David (Tesla500) chose it for the Chronos high-speed camera.

[sporadic]

IMO, their iCE40 line fills a niche that Xilinx and Altera won't.  Very small FPGA's targeted for mobile devices - http://www.latticesemi.com/en/Products/FPGAandCPLD/iCE40Ultra.aspx.  These devices however use their own environment for development (iCEcube2) as it's a product line which Lattice acquired. The development boards are rather cheap as well, with the iCEstick being the cheapest I believe - http://www.latticesemi.com/icestick.

[mikeselectricstuff]

Lattice is easily the leader at the very lowest end of FPGAs- I've not looked much at ICE40, but I like the XO2 series, which includes devices with onboard flash and core voltage regs, oscillators even (alvbeit not very accurate). The difference between them and some CPLDs from other makers is the series goes up to devices with blockRAM and PLLs in the same family, and there's even a QFN32. It would be nice if they did 48 & 64 pin QFP or QFN devices though.

[sporadic]

Lattice is easily the leader at the very lowest end of FPGAs- I've not looked much at ICE40, but I like the XO2 series, which includes devices with onboard flash and core voltage regs, oscillators even (alvbeit not very accurate). The difference between them and some CPLDs from other makers is the series goes up to devices with blockRAM and PLLs in the same family, and there's even a QFN32. It would be nice if they did 48 & 64 pin QFP or QFN devices though.

No QFP, but they have 48 pin QFN for the iCE40 Ultra and Ultra Plus.  I'm considering the iCE5LP1K in QFN-48 for a project.  Includes hard SPI, PLL, and oscillator.  They have on chip NVCM, but no flash. I plan on loading it from another micro.

[anovickis]

lattice diamond has gotten easier to use over the past few years and comes with activeHDL and synplicity s/w which are lattice specific but good to know for simulation, and for RTL visualization via synplify. I think they have a free version which is complete except it's trial for 30 days. You can get a mach XO3 board from digikey to play with for well under 100


I use the mach XO3 parts which offer internal configuration, but offer enough luts to do all my glue logic - and come in a variety of _small_ package sizes

[jefflieu]

Hello


I would like to know what Lattice's specialty is, i.e. what market? Telecoms, military etc. And what make them special i.e. low prices per gate etc. It seems that their focus is probably on communications equipment.

I am basically trying to find a motivation to spend the $198 dollar to purchase the products to learn the tools of a vendor other than Xilinx or Altera.

Does anyone have experience with this development environment? How is it? Can you contrast its positives and negatives relative to say Xilinx's tools.

Any comments are welcome.

Why do you want to move away from Xilinx or Altera? I also want to to know more about Lattice. Never got chance. Been doing FPGA for 8 years and never ever got chance to use Lattice.
I don't know the price if you go through proper distributors, but I did have a look on Digikey, and they're not much cheaper compared to Xilinx or Altera.

[MattHollands]

As sporadic said, I think they provide nice fpgas in the low power/small package/low price segment. I used the iCE40LP4k in a project last year with Lattice Diamond and iCE Cube 2.
The devices are nice but the development environment is nothing as good as Xilinx's Vivado. I ended up writing code in sublime - although maybe some people would do that anyway - I prefer having a proper IDE.

I ended up prototyping on a Xilinx device due to the nice IDE and then adapting the code in Lattice's environment to minimise time spent in iCE Cube 2.

[vraifluss]

Hi

The Diamond supports LFE5U-85 in ECP5, not LFE5UM-85 which has serdes IPs and demo project was built with..
One of Lattice EVT Boards has LFE5UM-85 device, and the demo codes were complied with LFE5U-85 in Lattice Diamond.
Having a JTAG ID mismatch issue as below while programming.

ECP5(LFE5UM-85F-BG756 ) programming download
Device#1 LFE5U-85F: Failed to verify the ID
(Expected: 0x41113043 Read: 0xFFFFFFFF).
ERROR - Check configuration setup: Unsuccessful.
ERROR: pgr_program failed.
ERROR - Programming failed.
 
Anyone has an experience in handling this issue?

[SiliconWizard]

Indeed, absolutely no need to spend a dime, the free version of Lattice Diamond supports most Lattice products except the very high-end ones. You would learn nothing more with the paid-for version unless you absolutely need to work with the unsupported FPGAs.

@vraifluss: I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve. Are you using the free version of Diamond? It doesn't support the LFE5UM-85 so even programming it from within Diamond might not work.
The message that appears shows a mismatch ("ECP5(LFE5UM-85F-BG756 ) programming download - Device#1 LFE5U-85F" that is kind of weird. That probably again comes from the fact that you're trying to work with an unsupported chip. The '0xFFFFFFFF' ID just means that the JTAG adapter couldn't read the ID. Not sure what you're hoping to do?

[iMo]

Device#1 LFE5U-85F: Failed to verify the ID
(Expected: 0x41113043 Read: 0xFFFFFFFF).

What programmer do you use?
It seems it is a wiring issue (when using FT2232-something for programming).

[vraifluss]

Yes. using diamond V3.10 as a free version. It is good to know that it doesn't support the LFE5UM-85.
Found that LFE5UM device is not showing in ECP5 device selector in v3.10 diamond.
But the lattice technical support has replied "it supports and it will work", so I had wasted time for several days.

Thank you for comments which make it clear. It seems that I have been trying to program unsupported chip.

Anyone has experience to use LFE5UM device in the latest Diamond? How much it costs?

Regards Vraifluss

[brucehoult]

Don't forget that Lattice FPGAs have recently been reverse-engineered and there is now an independent 100% open software toolchain for them:

http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/

[mikeselectricstuff]

Don't forget that Lattice FPGAs have recently been reverse-engineered and there is now an independent 100% open software toolchain for them:

http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/

Only the low-end ICE40 series AFAIK

[daveshah]

Clifford has now documented the bitstream of the Xilinx 7-series, and I've done the Lattice ECP5. But these won't be useful until we have a better place and route tool than VPR, which will likely come at some point in 2019.

[SiliconWizard]

Don't forget that Lattice FPGAs have recently been reverse-engineered and there is now an independent 100% open software toolchain for them:

http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/

Only the low-end ICE40 series AFAIK

Yes, and given that the ECP5 is probably at least an order of magnitude more complex, I doubt it will be supported by an open-source tool anytime soon.

[SiliconWizard]

Anyone has experience to use LFE5UM device in the latest Diamond? How much it costs?

I remember that Lattice used to have a subscription license for something like $99/year, but they have apparently removed any pricing information lately so I have no clue. You probably have to ask them.

[Bassman59]

Anyone has experience to use LFE5UM device in the latest Diamond? How much it costs?

I remember that Lattice used to have a subscription license for something like $99/year, but they have apparently removed any pricing information lately so I have no clue. You probably have to ask them.

For any devices a DIYer or hobbyist would use, the Lattice software tools are free.