Author Topic: New FPGA manufacturer - German Cologne Chip  (Read 2775 times)

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Offline daqqTopic starter

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New FPGA manufacturer - German Cologne Chip
« on: July 06, 2020, 11:23:01 am »
Found this in a newsletter I receive: https://www.colognechip.com/programmable-logic/gatemate/

Good to have another player.
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Offline AndyC_772

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Re: New FPGA manufacturer - German Cologne Chip
« Reply #1 on: July 06, 2020, 01:18:10 pm »
Wow, there's a name I've not seen in a long time. I used their ISDN interface parts in a few projects years ago.

Must admit, I'm mildly amused to see that they're still selling their ISDN chips as "Recommended for new projects"  :-DD

Offline soFPG

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Re: New FPGA manufacturer - German Cologne Chip
« Reply #2 on: July 06, 2020, 09:14:45 pm »
Quote
I can get Cyclone IV with 22k LE on Shenzhen market for some 3.5 dollars
Did you take a plane ticket to Shenzhen into account? I don't know if traveling to Shenzhen is reasonable to get some FPGAs.

Quote
I don't know how this 20k LUT chips can score $10 starting price.
Where did you get that price from?
« Last Edit: July 06, 2020, 09:17:29 pm by soFPG »
 

Offline Bassman59

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Re: New FPGA manufacturer - German Cologne Chip
« Reply #3 on: July 06, 2020, 11:40:47 pm »
I don't know how this 20k LUT chips can score $10 starting price. I can get Cyclone IV with 22k LE on Shenzhen market for some 3.5 dollars, and it is backed by Intel, plus it has a good and healthy market availability and immediate stock.
8-LUT generally means slower propagation delay, and 2.5Gbps SERDES is nothing niche.

Here's the real reason for these parts to exist: "Due to manufacturing in Europe, there is no danger of trade restrictions or high taxation."
 
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Offline soFPG

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Re: New FPGA manufacturer - German Cologne Chip
« Reply #4 on: July 07, 2020, 08:58:39 am »
Quote
If I can get the chip at that price at a real quantity, it must not be a fluke.
I am not saying it's a fluke but you can't (in my opinion) impose expectations from Shenzhen electronic silicon valley on European products.

As far as I can tell, 1.5$ Cyclone IV 7k LUTs on taobao (don't know about 22k LUTs parts) are just a thing because they get scraped off of products which were thrown away (e.g. you are buying used FPGAs which may or may not work).
 

Offline woofy

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Re: New FPGA manufacturer - German Cologne Chip
« Reply #5 on: July 07, 2020, 09:59:36 am »
Have to say, their "datasheet" is less than stella.
On a practical note, the lack of 3.3v I/O would put me off. Everything I've done so far (all of two jobs with iCE40's) has needed to interface to 3.3v logic and I don't see that changing. I'm more likely to choose Lattice over Cologne just to avoid level shifting.

Offline soFPG

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Re: New FPGA manufacturer - German Cologne Chip
« Reply #6 on: July 07, 2020, 10:12:35 am »
Quote
On a practical note, the lack of 3.3v I/O would put me off.
This was also the first thing I noticed. Bit of a bummer.
 

Offline Wiljan

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Re: New FPGA manufacturer - German Cologne Chip
« Reply #7 on: July 07, 2020, 12:58:27 pm »
Does 8-LUT (8 inputs with LUT-2 tree) means if fully decode 8 bit in (256 ) to 2 bit out ?
So it can have a Sbox 8x8 in 4 LUT's?
If so then I think it a very good move  :)
« Last Edit: July 07, 2020, 01:02:14 pm by Wiljan »
 

Online BrianHG

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Re: New FPGA manufacturer - German Cologne Chip
« Reply #8 on: July 07, 2020, 01:04:18 pm »
I don't know how this 20k LUT chips can score $10 starting price. I can get Cyclone IV with 22k LE on Shenzhen market for some 3.5 dollars, and it is backed by Intel, plus it has a good and healthy market availability and immediate stock.
8-LUT generally means slower propagation delay, and 2.5Gbps SERDES is nothing niche.
LOL, they would only catch my interest if their CCGM1A16, 327k LUT and 16 serdes was 10$.  The 20k LUT chip needs to be in the 2$ range with an included internal bootprom.
 

Offline filssavi

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Re: New FPGA manufacturer - German Cologne Chip
« Reply #9 on: July 07, 2020, 01:27:03 pm »
If you look at the website, it seems quite clear that they are not really interested to be a competitor to any of the big 4, their purpose in life is just to exist, so that if in the future a random US president bans sale of FPGAs to Europe, the military/ government can have something.

The STs and NXPs are not involved because both of their size (it would have been much more costly for the government to pay for their development), and also because they are a much more likely target of complaints from others for unlawful government subsidies (both STM and NXP have sizeable presence in the US) whereas such a small company will generally fly under the radar
 
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Offline NorthGuy

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Re: New FPGA manufacturer - German Cologne Chip
« Reply #10 on: July 07, 2020, 02:12:46 pm »
Does 8-LUT (8 inputs with LUT-2 tree) means if fully decode 8 bit in (256 ) to 2 bit out ?
So it can have a Sbox 8x8 in 4 LUT's?
If so then I think it a very good move  :)

They don't give much information. I guess this is a single 8-input LUT with some quirks. For eaxmple it might be possible to split it into two 7-input LUTs sharing the same inputs. Hence the two outputs. If there were two independent 8-input LUTs inside, it would be silly not to provide an extra input and a mux making it into a 9-input LUT.

 

Offline NorthGuy

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Re: New FPGA manufacturer - German Cologne Chip
« Reply #11 on: July 07, 2020, 02:16:05 pm »
As far as I can tell, 1.5$ Cyclone IV 7k LUTs on taobao (don't know about 22k LUTs parts) are just a thing because they get scraped off of products which were thrown away (e.g. you are buying used FPGAs which may or may not work).

The one I said is grey market chip but is 100% new and genuine. Chips don't grow on trees in China. They must came from Intel somehow.

One of possible ways is that it didn't pass all the QA tests.
 

Online rstofer

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Re: New FPGA manufacturer - German Cologne Chip
« Reply #12 on: July 07, 2020, 06:05:36 pm »
Anybody can make silicon, does the manufacturer have a free, competent, toolchain?  That would be my primary concern.  As I said, anybody can make silicon.
 

Offline AndyC_772

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Re: New FPGA manufacturer - German Cologne Chip
« Reply #13 on: July 08, 2020, 07:22:16 am »
Anybody can make silicon, does the manufacturer have a free, competent, toolchain?  That would be my primary concern.  As I said, anybody can make silicon.

That was my second thought (after "wow, are they still around").

I use FPGAs of this kind of size all the time, so a new vendor is genuinely interesting to me provided there are no major costs or technical hurdles in the way. Unfortunately it's quite apparent that they don't have the tool chain support in place - instead they say "design conversion free of charge for GateMateTM customers", and "Typically, a software framework for FPGA design is already installed at the customer side".

Well, yes, there is... Quartus, in my case, though I strongly suspect they're thinking of companies who have already paid out for Synplify - which, I presume, doesn't have a condition in the licence explicitly forbidding the user from targeting devices not made by the tool chain vendor.,

Clearly the use case for which these parts have been developed is along the lines of:

- design FPGA using Intel or Xilinx
- discover that, for legal or commercial reasons, continuing to buy parts from those companies is no longer possible or strategically advantageous
- convert existing, known working design to use a part from a European supplier
- ???
- keep manufacturing product

I'd be interested to hear from any engineers who use these devices out of choice, and not as a result of being told that they must use them because <commercial reason>.

Maybe I'll give them a call anyway, it could be interesting to see how they respond to "here's my VHDL, tell me how to make it work on your eval board".

Offline c64

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Re: New FPGA manufacturer - German Cologne Chip
« Reply #14 on: July 09, 2020, 02:54:08 am »
I don't know how this 20k LUT chips can score $10 starting price. I can get Cyclone IV with 22k LE on Shenzhen market for some 3.5 dollars, and it is backed by Intel, plus it has a good and healthy market availability and immediate stock.
I've seen very cheap Cyclone IV on taobao, claim to be brand new. Around ¥15 for EP4CE6E22C8N and ¥25 for EP4CE10E22C8N.
Do you think they really could be brand new and not rejects?
 

Offline laugensalm

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Re: New FPGA manufacturer - German Cologne Chip
« Reply #15 on: July 12, 2020, 09:22:54 am »
I'd be interested to hear from any engineers who use these devices out of choice, and not as a result of being told that they must use them because <commercial reason>.

Maybe I'll give them a call anyway, it could be interesting to see how they respond to "here's my VHDL, tell me how to make it work on your eval board".

I gave this a go (without having a board) just to see what the output netlist would be like, but it appears that some toolchain issues are not entirely solved yet. Then the lockdown kicked in and I got sidetracked.

I think they would stir up the community if they presented an open yosys based toolchain flow. Yet, simulation models of their cells aren't in the open, so it's hard to definitely tell for an outsider if some of the promising technology advances would really perform.
 


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