I bought a bunch of these off some tweaker I know I seen the name before thought it may be something good so I got them please let me know what i should do with them i have no idea about any of this kind of stuff i just like flipping things making money please be honest
LOL, $45K, I don't think so!
Nobody buys Xilinx FPGAs from Digikey, anyway.
Good luck selling those in the pic at $100/pcs or so.
Salvaging these IC parts from the board may be a big undertaking, I would think companies would not go that route, companies that would develop on such expensive platform would go through proper channels, obtaining samples from Xilinx and stuff. A mad scientist or hobbyist may be interested but unlikely to pay anything close to 4 digits. The parts condition is also unkown, if the board experienced an overvoltage the ICs may be dead. It would be a gamble for one to buy this board. Still some may be willing so I think you could put the board for an eBay auction with starting price of a couple hundred bucks and let the nature do its thing.
First thing: you don't even know if any of those FPGAs are functional.
Let's say they are... (but how are you going to test them?)
Scavenging those huge BGAs would require unsoldering them (probably not too difficult with hot air and a *large* nozzle), but also REBALLING them (otherwise completely useless), which is not that easy to do and would be pretty much hit or miss especially given the very large number of pads.
So hum. Yeah. Those parts, when bought new, are atrociously expensive, but I don't know who would be foolish enough to re-use them given the above. Even if they are sold for cheap - the required PCBs for doing anything useful with them would already cost a lot, so risking using non-functional parts? Yeah.
Apart from the curious who'd like to 1/ try their reballing tools and skills and 2/ who'd like to see if the ICs could be reused, and make nice 4K Youtube videos about it...
Just saying.
One more thing about selling, those are very high tech chips, even for USA.
There is a big chance for those FPGAs to be classified as ITAR products.
There are a lot of parts recyclers in shenzhen who will probably take those for between $10 and $50 each. Reballing is easy and testing is trivial. They have BGA sockets and testing would just involve running JTAG boundary scan.
Also don't be deceived by digikey prices. I know a few firms that get FPGAs direct from Xilinx, at volumes of a few hundred pcs that they pay no more than 1/10th of the distributor prices. The manufacturer of that board probably paid on the order of $3000 for those chips. Still very expensive, but if you look on the second hand chips market these devaluate by another factor of 10 (when they are tested working). If they are in unknown condition nobody will touch it except at rock bottom prices.
That's a tough one, yes the parts are insanely expensive new, but the issue here is that no company building equipment around such high end parts is going to be interested in unknown salvaged chips, and they are FAR bigger than the typical FPGA hobbyist is going to have a use for, either they would need to pay big bucks for the paid development tools or find a pirated license file because those are well beyond what the free tools support. Designing a PCB to use one and then re-balling and soldering one is also going to be well beyond the capabilities of the typical hobbyist, BUT a very small handful of people would probably be willing to put forth the effort and follow through to bring one up just to see if they can.
So my guess is pennies on the dollar compared to new price would be optimistic, maybe $20-$30 per IC to the right person. Considerably more if they were on a usable board containing at least the minimal amount of support hardware to power up the FPGA as the whole board could be re-purposed. As it stands, they are super cool artifacts that will be very difficult to unload as anything more than a curiosity or desk ornament. It's a little bit like if you took a modern 10TB hard drive back to 1995 and tried to sell it to someone, the amount of storage it contained would be worth an astronomical amount of money but SATA hadn't been invented yet so they'd have no reasonable way to make it work.
... they are FAR bigger than the typical FPGA hobbyist is going to have a use for, either they would need to pay big bucks for the paid development tools or find a pirated license file because those are well beyond what the free tools support.
Any clue how much the ballpark number are those development tools/software cost ?
So this was a lot of money at one time pretty positive they are in working condition
I gave you USD 50 for the full board deal?
I wonder what was the missing chip, in the middle. It has a different footprint, slightly bigger. It's always the bigger chip in the middle that's missing.
It reminds me of a prototype Kintex board (or maybe it was Virtex, I don't remember) I've seen some years ago. Xilinx didn't had the chip in production yet, they were still developing it, so they sent to major software developers an emulation of the chip, a board with some intermediary product that was lacking any physical I/O, but had the FPGA logic core, so we could test the logic of our designs in parallel with the development of the physical Xilinx chip.
There are just too many Virtex UltraScale on the same board for a normal application, and no visible I/O, somebody should check if those are production chips or just prototype/engineering (pre)samples.
I've seen boards a bit like that used for simulating large ASIC designs before taping them out. They have lots of large FPGAs all close together, but they're all connected to each other, and there isn't a lot else on the board other than power supplies.
Maybe a Virtex Ultrascale + with embedded 16gb HBM memory since there is no other memory on the PCB.
Here is the 8GB HBM version:
https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/xilinx-inc/XCVU37P-3FSVH2892E/122-XCVU37P-3FSVH2892E-ND/10445719The unlisted 16GB HBM version with larger IO count is double price and I bet special order only.
If I had to guess, I would design such boards like this as a once use case to proof emulate the core of a massive 3D accelerator GPU before getting ready to engineer the final ASIC, around 4-5 years ago. Today, even these FPGAs wouldn't cut it.
pretty positive they are in working condition
Just the fact of seeing you handle these without static protection and putting them on a freaking car seat, if I had a purpose for them I'd now consider them as faulty and not worth the effort reprocessing them
I'd take one or 2 to use as keychain or something though.
If I had to guess, I would design such boards like this as a once use case to proof emulate the core of a massive 3D accelerator GPU before getting ready to engineer the final ASIC, around 4-5 years ago. Today, even these FPGAs wouldn't cut it.
Speculating freely, there is an Australian company by the name of Firetail Robotics that works with various autonomous applications including UAVs and could be military-adjacent. While that board might not be enough to satisfy spec-queen gamers, they might be enough to prototype some respectable machine vision tasks.
Wouldn't Virtexes in that size be export restricted ?
I suspect that just PDS suitable for that kind of FPGA is going to cost a pretty penny.
... they are FAR bigger than the typical FPGA hobbyist is going to have a use for, either they would need to pay big bucks for the paid development tools or find a pirated license file because those are well beyond what the free tools support.
Any clue how much the ballpark number are those development tools/software cost ?
I found this post from 2013, I would assume the cost is higher now but I've never checked.
Software Only
Buy Node-Locked License
Price: $2995
Lead Time: Immediate
Buy Floating License
Price: $3595
Lead Time: Immediate
Node-Locked vs Floating?
Vivado System Edition
Buy Online From Xilinx
Software Only
Buy Node-Locked License
Price: $4795
Lead Time: Immediate
Buy Floating License
Price: $5795
Lead Time: Immediate
Node-Locked vs Floating?
Just the fact of seeing you handle these without static protection and putting them on a freaking car seat, if I had a purpose for them I'd now consider them as faulty and not worth the effort reprocessing them
I'd take one or 2 to use as keychain or something though.
Exactly. They're effectively scrap at this point. Maybe some people on here will consider it worth their time but I doubt much money.
pretty positive they are in working condition
Pretty Positive means
a) As long as it's not my time or finical risk
b) I would put 10K in escrow to compensate someone for any time/expense if these are not in working condition?
Please chose a OR b.
As others have pointed out these would be high risky for anyone who had a use for them even at zero cost to invest time/effort into.
Turn them into keychains and sell them at the local swap market for $5 a piece.
I wouldn’t give you $5 for the lot.
It is way too much effort for me to remove them from the boards, then clean up the solder residue, drill a hole in the corner, fit a 10c keychain… and then waste 2 hours of my time trying to sell them at my local Saturday market to people who have no idea what they are.
Hope you didn’t actually pay anything for that junk.
