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Lattice FPGA & CPLD

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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:

--- Quote from: mikeselectricstuff on June 27, 2017, 03:45:27 pm ---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.

--- End quote ---
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.

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