Xilinx announces new Spartan-7 line

[marshallh]

http://press.xilinx.com/2015-11-19-Xilinx-Announces-the-Spartan-7-FPGA-Family

SAN JOSE, Calif., Nov. 19, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ:XLNX) today announced the Spartan®-7 FPGA family that will deliver I/O intensive devices for cost-sensitive applications. The new family will address connectivity requirements across a breadth of markets including automotive, consumer, industrial IoT, data center, wired and wireless communications, and portable medical solutions. All new Spartan-7 FPGAs will be supported on the no-cost Vivado® Design Suite WebPACK™ Edition, as well as the Vivado Design and System Editions, to enable fastest time to integration and implementation.

The Spartan-7 FPGA family will deliver high I/O ratios in small form factor packages, critical for cost-sensitive markets. The family will provide up to 4X price-performance-per-watt improvement over previous generations for flexible connectivity, interface bridging, and companion chip functionality.

"Xilinx has a long history of providing cost optimized solutions with our Spartan class of products," says Kirk Saban, Senior Director of FPGA & SoC Product Management and Marketing at Xilinx. "The introduction of the Spartan-7 FPGA family re-affirms our continued commitment to that heritage and extends our multi-generational leadership in I/O density, small form factor packaging, and power efficiency."

The new family will be co-optimized with the industry-leading Vivado Design Suite to deliver an IP-centric and system-centric development environment to address short development cycle requirements and aggressive time-to-market pressures common in cost-conscious markets. The Spartan-7 FPGA family will extend the existing Xilinx 7 Series portfolio, implemented in TSMC's 28nm HPL process.

About Xilinx

Xilinx is the leading provider of All Programmable FPGAs, SoCs, MPSoCs, and 3D ICs. Xilinx uniquely enables applications that are both software defined and hardware optimized – powering industry advancements in Cloud Computing, SDN/NFV, Video/Vision, Industrial IoT, and 5G Wireless. For more information, visit www.xilinx.com                                                   

[KE5FX]

The Spartan-7 FPGA family will deliver high I/O ratios in small form factor packages, critical for cost-sensitive markets. The family will provide up to 4X price-performance-per-watt improvement over previous generations for flexible connectivity, interface bridging, and companion chip functionality.

Interesting, everything they're saying about Spartan-7 was previously said about Artix.  Are they just renaming Artix, or do they really have four separate 7-series product lines now?

An Artix device with the more flexible I/O voltage support of the Spartan-6 parts would be welcome.

[Kjelt]

I always wonder what some marketeers think that an IoT device is.
Most IoT devices can not handle full ip stacks and need to be dirt cheap, think of bom around $5 to $10 , weird if the fpga iself costs more than that 

[daqq]

Anything new with solderable packages? (TQFP and similar?) Or is it all BGA with absurdly high technology requirements?

[Bassman59]

Anything new with solderable packages? (TQFP and similar?) Or is it all BGA with absurdly high technology requirements?

No data anywhere on the Xilinx web site. Only the press release.

Hopefully they will have non-BGA packages. I wonder if they think they need to target the small FPGA market that Lattice seems to own. Something smaller than a Spartan 3AN-50 is welcome, especially when you can bolt it onto an external memory interface on your favorite low-cost ARM.

[marshallh]

I would be surprised if there was more than just 144-qfp. Likely there will be mostly 0.8mm around 256-300 balls with finer CSP options.
Making piddly small QFP packages just doesn't make sense when the die is too big to fit.

[autobot]

Nice , they're offering their high level synthesis tools for free for this chip.

[Bassman59]

Nice , they're offering their high level synthesis tools for free for this chip.

They're calling it a Spartan 7, so my guess is that they've decided to simplify Artix 7 in some fashion (removing certain high-end features, and certainly not offering gigabit transceivers), but the fabric and routing are the same (that's the selling point of the whole 7 series, much of the features are the same). So supporting it in Vivado would seem to be straightforward.

Also, ISE is dead, so of course the new chip needs to be supported in Vivado.

[that_guy]

Anything new with solderable packages? (TQFP and similar?) Or is it all BGA with absurdly high technology requirements?

We can hope, but the bit in the release that says "...will deliver high I/O ratios in small form factor packages" does not look great for the hobbyist.

[KE5FX]

Anything new with solderable packages? (TQFP and similar?) Or is it all BGA with absurdly high technology requirements?

We can hope, but the bit in the release that says "...will deliver high I/O ratios in small form factor packages" does not look great for the hobbyist.

You just need to readjust your worldview.  Think of the package as a die, and think of an integration board as the part.   Xess, ZTEX, Opal Kelly, and numerous other vendors offer "parts" that incorporate most of the common "dies."

The QFP-versus-QFN/BGA battle is lost, so don't fight it.

[photon]

Nice , they're offering their high level synthesis tools for free for this chip.

Their motivation is to have the users debug Vivado. It needs it.

[mark03]

Does anyone know the actual die size in, say, Artix-7 devices?  And is it always the same die for every device in the family?

[Rasz]

certainly not offering gigabit transceivers

well, in that case they can F off
its 2015, even cheap fpgas should be able to deal with fullhd video

[marshallh]

Does anyone know the actual die size in, say, Artix-7 devices?  And is it always the same die for every device in the family?

All 50T and smaller devices (15T, 35T) are the same die, and 75T/100T are the same. They are presumably binned as such.

[Bassman59]

certainly not offering gigabit transceivers

well, in that case they can F off
its 2015, even cheap fpgas should be able to deal with fullhd video

oh, I wouldn't mind if they had a part in the family with gigabit transceivers, but I think that for the majority of designs which could use a small FPGA, the transceiver adds too much cost for no benefit. Not everything needs HD video

[JoeN]

I wonder if they will somehow make the part work with JESD204 without requiring thousands of dollars of add-on "IP".    It would be interesting to try out some of these newfangled parts.

[tggzzz]

There are a number of possible objectives and means for them to achieve the objectives.

If they want to "strongly dissuade" people from using ISE for new designs, then they might have Spartan 3/6 equivalent devices in a 7 fabric.

If people want small cheap devices with Spartan 6 level logic complexity plus high speed i/o, and are "forced" to used other manufacturers devices, then Xilinx might simply be making Spartan-size devices with 7 series fabric and i/o blocks.

No doubt Xilinx will let us know when it suits them

[nctnico]

Also, ISE is dead, so of course the new chip needs to be supported in Vivado.

I wouldn't say that so quickly. Vivado still lacks several synthesis features like being able to preload block rams properly from VHDL. One of the (open hardware) projects I work on every now and then uses that but it can't be synthesised with Vivado yet.

[KE5FX]

Ah, Vivado.  The iTunes of FPGA tools.

[hamster_nz]

Also, ISE is dead, so of course the new chip needs to be supported in Vivado.

I wouldn't say that so quickly. Vivado still lacks several synthesis features like being able to preload block rams properly from VHDL. One of the (open hardware) projects I work on every now and then uses that but it can't be synthesised with Vivado yet.

Interesting....

I have a few projects that do just this, and they seem fine - either inferred blocks or setting the content by using INIT attributes with primitives.

Do you have an AR # or a link, so it can't catch me out....

[ElektroQuark]

No updates in XILINXs web about the SPARTAN 7.
Anyone with inside information about releases or form factors?

[Someone]

No updates in XILINXs web about the SPARTAN 7.
Anyone with inside information about releases or form factors?

Xilinx have been talking about the Artix 7 parts since at least 2012 (http://press.xilinx.com/2012-07-17-Xilinx-Ships-First-Artix-7-FPGAs-Raising-the-Performance-Bar-for-Portable-and-Small-Form-Factor-Applications-at-the-Edge), still not in wide distribution and not at all what was originally described. So its anyones guess when Spartan 7 parts might arrive.

[ElektroQuark]

So no news...

Thank you!

[alexxk]

With the sale of the Spartan 6 development boards I have some hope that they will announce Spartan 7 soon

[EEVblog]

I can remember using beta silicon for the Spartan (1) 

[Scrts]

With the sale of the Spartan 6 development boards I have some hope that they will announce Spartan 7 soon

It's coming, should be cheaper than Artix family.

[rstofer]

Nice , they're offering their high level synthesis tools for free for this chip.

Xilinx has offered a WebPack version of their ISE software for years.  Vivado is no different.  But the WebPack version is quite limited in that you don't get access to Xilinx IP and ChipScope won't work, among other things.

The next version up, System (?), comes with access to some amount of IP including the ILA (Internal Logic Analyzer) which is quite handy.  You can get free certificates for this version when you buy certain specific boards such as the Arty or Digilent Basys3 (among many others).  This is a node and chip locked version so you can really only design for the specific chips/boards for which you are licensed (if you want to use IP).

According to the Wiki article, Xilinx spent $200M developing Vivado.  That's a pretty huge investment and I suspect they will amortize it over 10 years or so.  ISE has been around for more than 15 years.  I have been using it for 12! 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xilinx_Vivado

I will be using ISE 14.7 forever.  I have a bunch of Spartan 3 type boards and I don't intend to scrap them just because a new chip is on the market.  I'm starting to come around with Vivado but it's been a struggle.

[KE5FX]

Nice , they're offering their high level synthesis tools for free for this chip.

Xilinx has offered a WebPack version of their ISE software for years.  Vivado is no different.  But the WebPack version is quite limited in that you don't get access to Xilinx IP and ChipScope won't work, among other things.

No, you actually get access to a ton of Xilinx IP with WebPack, including essentially all of the important DSP stuff.  Things like JESD204B cores, Viterbi decoders and whatnot still have to be licensed for $$$.

I believe Microblaze is now free as well, which is a fairly big deal to some users.

I will be using ISE 14.7 forever.  I have a bunch of Spartan 3 type boards and I don't intend to scrap them just because a new chip is on the market.  I'm starting to come around with Vivado but it's been a struggle.

I was pretty annoyed with Vivado at first, and upset at the fact that I had to migrate to it in order to work with the more useful Artix chips.  But the last couple of builds have brought big improvements in stability and (subjectively speaking) overall quality.  At this point I would be even more annoyed if I were forced to go back to ISE.  So don't give up.

The other thing that I'd say is that Spartan3 is only worth sticking with if your time is worth nothing.  (Or, I guess, if you have I/O requirements that 7-series parts can't accommodate.) The newer parts are so much easier to work with it's not even funny, and Vivado is a big part of that.

I'm far from a Xilinx fanboi, but I'm pretty psyched for Spartan7.  It should scratch some prominent itches around here.

[hamster_nz]

I was pretty annoyed with Vivado at first, and upset at the fact that I had to migrate to it in order to work with the more useful Artix chips.  But the last couple of builds have brought big improvements in stability and (subjectively speaking) overall quality. 

Last night I installed Vivado 2016.1 (upgrading from 2015.2), and one great feature for me is some sort of on-the-fly parsing of VHDL, identifying typos in signal names as well as syntax errors.

Yep, Quartus has had this for a while...

[rstofer]

The other thing that I'd say is that Spartan3 is only worth sticking with if your time is worth nothing.  (Or, I guess, if you have I/O requirements that 7-series parts can't accommodate.) The newer parts are so much easier to work with it's not even funny, and Vivado is a big part of that.

I'm 12+ years into retirement, my time is worth absolutely nothing.  I own the Spartan 2 & 3 boards and while I'll eventually scrap the Spartan 2s, I really like the Spartan 3 Starter Board from Digilent.  Mostly I like having 3 ea 50 pin headers that I can use for pretty much whatever I want.  That's a lot of IO lines and the PMOD approach isn't even close.  First example, right out of the gate, I prefer Compact Flash to SD Cards.  They're just plain easier to deal with.  But they do take a lot of IO lines.  That 50 pin header is real handy!  The FX header on the Nexys 2 board is ok but it's just one header.  I also like boards with static RAM or that Micron PSRAM. Again, simple to deal with.

I am a huge fan of Xilinx and Digilent but I can't help noticing that the newer boards are priced beyond my level of interest.  At the most, I might buy the Zybo board ($189) but that's about as far as I can go.  There's no grant money for old guys just messing around.

[obiwanjacobi]

I can remember using beta silicon for the Spartan (1) 

Yeah, you're old! 

[Ice-Tea]

Xilinx has offered a WebPack version of their ISE software for years.  Vivado is no different.  But the WebPack version is quite limited in that you don't get access to Xilinx IP and ChipScope won't work, among other things.

No, you actually get access to a ton of Xilinx IP with WebPack, including essentially all of the important DSP stuff.  Things like JESD204B cores, Viterbi decoders and whatnot still have to be licensed for $$$.

I believe Microblaze is now free as well, which is a fairly big deal to some users.

But no Chipscope. And that sucks.

[hamster_nz]

You might have been talking about ISE. But with the recent Vivado HLx Webpack you do get the virtual logic analyser, as well as the C to HDL tools at zero cost for the lower end parts (most of the smaller zynq, artix & kentix parts)

[Ice-Tea]

AH... Thanks for the info. I guess my age shows too. I worked with an original Stratix ES 

[tggzzz]

I am a huge fan of Xilinx and Digilent but I can't help noticing that the newer boards are priced beyond my level of interest.  At the most, I might buy the Zybo board ($189) but that's about as far as I can go.  There's no grant money for old guys just messing around.

There are cheaper boards than that around, e.g.
https://shop.trenz-electronic.de/en/TE0723-02M-ArduZynq-Arduino-compatible-Xilinx-Zynq-7010-FPGA-module
https://www.parallella.org/
http://www.myirtech.com/list.asp?id=502
and I'm sure there are others.

[rstofer]

I am a huge fan of Xilinx and Digilent but I can't help noticing that the newer boards are priced beyond my level of interest.  At the most, I might buy the Zybo board ($189) but that's about as far as I can go.  There's no grant money for old guys just messing around.

There are cheaper boards than that around, e.g.
https://shop.trenz-electronic.de/en/TE0723-02M-ArduZynq-Arduino-compatible-Xilinx-Zynq-7010-FPGA-module
https://www.parallella.org/
http://www.myirtech.com/list.asp?id=502
and I'm sure there are others.

Yes, there are other boards and http://www.ztex.de/ should be added to the list.  I have one of their 2.01b boards with the debug board attachment and it's pretty neat because the FX USB chip adds fast data transfer between the FPGA and a PC.

I just tend to like the boards with more gadgets.  The Digilent Basys3 is pretty nice because it has 16 toggle switches, 5 buttons, a 4 digit 7 segment display and a VGA jack.  This is just perfect for a small computer of some kind.  The only question is whether the chip has enough resources.  More to follow...

[KE5FX]

Xilinx has offered a WebPack version of their ISE software for years.  Vivado is no different.  But the WebPack version is quite limited in that you don't get access to Xilinx IP and ChipScope won't work, among other things.

No, you actually get access to a ton of Xilinx IP with WebPack, including essentially all of the important DSP stuff.  Things like JESD204B cores, Viterbi decoders and whatnot still have to be licensed for $$$.

I believe Microblaze is now free as well, which is a fairly big deal to some users.

But no Chipscope. And that sucks.

ChipScope = allocate a few pins in the .UCF or .XDC file and hook up a scope.

[tggzzz]

I am a huge fan of Xilinx and Digilent but I can't help noticing that the newer boards are priced beyond my level of interest.  At the most, I might buy the Zybo board ($189) but that's about as far as I can go.  There's no grant money for old guys just messing around.

There are cheaper boards than that around, e.g.
https://shop.trenz-electronic.de/en/TE0723-02M-ArduZynq-Arduino-compatible-Xilinx-Zynq-7010-FPGA-module
https://www.parallella.org/
http://www.myirtech.com/list.asp?id=502
and I'm sure there are others.

Yes, there are other boards and http://www.ztex.de/ should be added to the list.  I have one of their 2.01b boards with the debug board attachment and it's pretty neat because the FX USB chip adds fast data transfer between the FPGA and a PC.

I just tend to like the boards with more gadgets.  The Digilent Basys3 is pretty nice because it has 16 toggle switches, 5 buttons, a 4 digit 7 segment display and a VGA jack.  This is just perfect for a small computer of some kind.  The only question is whether the chip has enough resources.  More to follow...

I'd forgotten ztex, but when I looked at their offerings a few years ago, I liked what I saw.

As for "enough resources", I'm going into "old codger mode" The first computer I used was an 18 bit machine with 39 bit memory, and an architectural maximum of 8K words (i.e. total 319488 bit memory). That was sufficient for commercial operation over decades. Its Algol-60 compiler was famous (being written by Tony Hoare of CSP and quicksort fame), and only occupied 4K words. Algol-60 was aptly described as an improvement on most of its successors

So yes, I'm sure a Spartan-6 does have enough resources

[rstofer]

My project is a code perfect implementation of an IBM 1130 that I first programmed in 1970.  It runs the entire OS including Fortran and the Macro Assembler.  The original was a very cool computer - the first a person could see over.

I started the project on a Spartan 3 Starter Board and have moved it to a Nexys2.  Next I will move it to the Artix or Basys 3 if there are enough cells and it looks like there are.

In addition to the CPU and Compact Flash disk drive, I also have serial ports for the Console Typewriter, Console Keyboard, Printer and Card Reader.  The Plotter is emulated in an mbed with the optimized output fed over TCP to my LaserJet.  It even has the IBM Electronic Circuit Analysis Package (ECAP) that I used in my undergrad studies.

The real machine had only 8k words and mine has the max of 32k words.  The original ran at about 400 kHz with lots of steps per instruction (not to mention an adder that didn't implement carry logic but instead repeatedly applied carry operations until none remained) and mine runs at 50 MHz.

I have puttered with this thing for about 10 years.  Nothing has changed (or improved), just migration from board to board.

I have the original 2 volume Algol 60 books that include the source listings.  I had to write a tiny Algol compiler in grad school ('76) and the only machine I could get at ran time-shared BASIC.  It's hard to write clean code in BASIC!  It would be kind of fun to build a CPU that was more or less optimized for Algol or even Pascal.  I wrote most of an FPGA core to implement Wirth's CDC 6400 Pascal but I got hung up when it came to system calls.  I now know how to do that.

For many years, I have wanted to build BLUE, an elementary 16 bit computer in Caxton C Foster's "Computer Architecture".  The CPU has nothing to recommend it except that it is conceptually simple.  Al Williams made a hyped up version that is over at Open Cores
http://www.drdobbs.com/embedded-systems/the-spartan-blue-cpu-in-verilog/228700593

That Basys3 board will be perfect so that's the next project.

[tggzzz]

The original [IBM1103]was a very cool computer - the first a person could see over.

Well, I'm 5'3" and I could see over a 1959 Elliott 803 It ran at 2kIPS since the logic was all serial.

It would be kind of fun to build a CPU that was more or less optimized for Algol or even Pascal.

See the Burroughs B5000 and successor machines. Ivan Godard is still around and working on a very interesting innovative machine, "The Mill". Details continue to emerge as patents are filed.

[rstofer]

See the Burroughs B5000 and successor machines. Ivan Godard is still around and working on a very interesting innovative machine, "The Mill". Details continue to emerge as patents are filed.

I love stack oriented machines!  I have been playing with ZPU and it's a very minimal design but it is a register rich stack oriented RISC design.  The entire processor takes about 100 lines of code.

It could be fun to build something like a B5000 but I'm not sure if enough documentation survives.  Then too, there's no point in building a processor if there is no canned software to run on it.  Writing a full OS is a rather daunting task.

A lot of the top names in computing were involved with  the Burroughs machines and ALGOL:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems

[suicidaleggroll]

The Spartan 7 line has been added to the 7-series docs from Xilinx, and it looks like there is a QFP-144 package available, all the way up to the XC7S25:
https://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/data_sheets/ds180_7Series_Overview.pdf