Typical use cases for massive FPGA's?

[MarkS]

I watched Phil's Lab's latest about his Zync Ultrascale+ project and decided to check out the part on Digikey. The top of the line Ultrascale+ part has 1700+ pins, 930K logic cells and costs over $43,000 USD and I'm pretty sure there are bigger FPGA's out there. What are these monsters used for? What are some real world examples of their use?

[mikeselectricstuff]

ASIC prototyping, high-end comms, high-end test equipment, high-speed trading platforms, supercomputing.

bear in mind  that nobody using these pays anywhere near Digikey prices for them

[DavidAlfa]

43K for a (Very beefy) FPGA?
Holy*** didn't knew they could go that far!

[RoGeorge]

Sometimes needed in military, DSP, research, etc.  For example National Instruments have boards with top line FPGAs, boards that fit in a PXI chassis, and can be used without any FPGA knowledge, programmed by drag and drop generic processing blocks in LabVIEW FPGA.

Prices in the industry are much lower than listed at Digikey.

[mikeselectricstuff]

Most expensive one  listed on Digikey is £134,000 !

[Berni]

For example Nvidia has a few racks filled with giant FPGAs.

It is a ASIC design verification system where they can load in the design of an entire chip and watch it run for real. It still won't run at full speed of the final chip, but it is way faster than a simulation could run it, so they can run a lot of tests trough it, trying to find ways in how it might break before they commit to those very very expensive masks to produce the chip.

Problem is that the area efficiency of FPGAs is really poor. As they kept pushing the transistor count on ASICs it means that even the smaller ASICs are too big to fit in the mere mortal FPGAs that we can afford to buy, so people who do ASIC verification on them need to pony up the cash.

Also sometimes there are very niche applications that don't have the volume to make a ASIC financially viable. Like specialized equipment, where the worldwide demand is only 2 or 3 digits. A lot of military applications fall into this, like they don't make all that many fighter jets because they are really expensive (and this is one of the reasons they are so expensive)

[DiTBho]

if need to simulate 16 CPU RISC cores + a cross bar-matrix for both devs and ICE + tr-ram, you for sure need a *BIG* fpga, with *LOT* bram and *LOT* LE.

Umm, then you see there are Ampere 128 cores, and they are not "simple RISC cores" but rather "ARM cores", so ... needs+=LOT_MORE(LE, BRAM, ...)

and then you need a cluster to synthetize and simulate

why life is so complex? 

[ftg]

Telecoms like 5G base stations, test equipment, military uses RADAR or SIGINT/EW receivers.
All of those use those really big UltraScale's. 

[tszaboo]

I've talked with a guy who was selling very high end boards with it. He said that some satellite project was using dozens of the boards with them, as big as it gets. I have to guess, spending ie. 2 MEUR on future proof reprogrammable FPGAs is peanuts compared to launching an Arianne V which is 150MEUR.

[SiliconWizard]

ASIC prototyping, high-end comms, high-end test equipment, high-speed trading platforms, supercomputing.

bear in mind  that nobody using these pays anywhere near Digikey prices for them

Yes. But still several thousands.
Huges dies, "niche" markets, so obviously prices have to be pretty high. No way around it.

[coppice]

Big FPGAs are how they developed 5G before committing it to custom silicon. Big FPGAs are how they are developing enhancements to 5G before committing them to custom silicon. Big FPGAs are how they are experimenting with 6G right now. The cellular industry are big users of big FPGAs.

[ejeffrey]

I think the higher price zynq ultrascale+ MPSoC are a few thousand dollars retail, not 10s of thousands.  The super expensive ones are the RFSoC which have multi gigasamlle DACs and ADCs: worth it for the people who need that, and the virtex ultrascale+ that have absokutely massive logic resources that are the bread and butter of ASIC simulation. There are also the versal 7nm chips which are the last and greatest.  I'm not super familiar with the product names but again cost is a very nonlinear function of capacity.

[langwadt]

some +20 years ago I did an asic prototype of an arm7tdmis and Bluetooth transceiver (minus the actual RF) in an FPGA, though I think it was only $5000-$6000 for the FPGA. But with a million dollar mask set and months to redo ROM code on the line it was "cheap"

[langwadt]

I think the higher price zynq ultrascale+ MPSoC are a few thousand dollars retail, not 10s of thousands.  The super expensive ones are the RFSoC which have multi gigasamlle DACs and ADCs: worth it for the people who need that, and the virtex ultrascale+ that have absokutely massive logic resources that are the bread and butter of ASIC simulation. There are also the versal 7nm chips which are the last and greatest.  I'm not super familiar with the product names but again cost is a very nonlinear function of capacity.

and a mask for an asic in those technologies are ridiculously expensive, makes senses to spread that out 

[SiliconWizard]

some +20 years ago I did an asic prototype of an arm7tdmis and Bluetooth transceiver (minus the actual RF) in an FPGA, though I think it was only $5000-$6000 for the FPGA. But with a million dollar mask set and months to redo ROM code on the line it was "cheap"

Yep, people who haven't dealt with protoyping ASICs may not see it immediately this way, but it can be extremely expensive (depending on process node), so in comparison a few thousands bucks is nothing.

Heck, it's even nothing compared to the cost of the engineers working on the project, just to keep things in perspective.

[gnuarm]

I watched Phil's Lab's latest about his Zync Ultrascale+ project and decided to check out the part on Digikey. The top of the line Ultrascale+ part has 1700+ pins, 930K logic cells and costs over $43,000 USD and I'm pretty sure there are bigger FPGA's out there. What are these monsters used for? What are some real world examples of their use?

Sometimes it is just a way of future proofing a design.  I worked for a company who made telecom test gear.  They were designing a new product that included some functionality of existing products, with a new capability and potential capabilities in the future.  I believe the market price was around $200,000 (2000 prices).  They needed around 10% of the size of the FPGA they put into the box.  The idea being that new capabilities would never be limited by the size of the FPGA.  I want to say the FPGA cost $50,000 list.  Of course, it was very common at the time to negotiate pricing that could be a small fraction of the list price, but still!!!

The expected market of the product was 10 units... total.

[EEVblog]

I watched Phil's Lab's latest about his Zync Ultrascale+ project and decided to check out the part on Digikey. The top of the line Ultrascale+ part has 1700+ pins, 930K logic cells and costs over $43,000 USD and I'm pretty sure there are bigger FPGA's out there. What are these monsters used for? What are some real world examples of their use?

We used these for underwater sonar beamforming.

ASIC prototyping is another area.
https://www.s2cinc.com/

[EEVblog]

Most expensive one  listed on Digikey is £134,000 !

You won't get it much cheaper if you only want 1 or a few and go through the local dealer.
Usually products using these are not what anyone would consider high volume. I'm even talking double digits becoming "high volume".
For example, the military underwater sonar beamformer board I worked on had half a dozen massive expensive FPGA's on the one giant board, and the production volume was 4 boards.

[BrianHG]

Most expensive one  listed on Digikey is £134,000 !

You won't get it much cheaper if you only want 1 or a few and go through the local dealer.

Yes, even in my early days, I would create report's with a few local dealers/distributors for different big IC firms.  I got free access to local seminars and in the case of Altera, free Quartus/and it's predecessor's keys for a month at a time and dirt cheap smaller FPGA to help start me up until I purchased an authentic seat.  (Note that this was the beginning of 1990's and there wasn't such free access to such tools on the internet like the luxury we have today.)  Even had access to Sony's latest first gen digital video decoders and audio processors for analog and digital TV at the time, many of the parts and data sheets for free.  (Yes, we used to pay for data sheets/books when you were beginning at the ground level.)

[TimCambridge]

The top of the line Ultrascale+ part has 1700+ pins, 930K logic cells and costs over $43,000 USD and I'm pretty sure there are bigger FPGA's out there.

Not your father's XC2064 Any typical Place & Route times? How much memory to run P&R?

[gnuarm]

Most expensive one  listed on Digikey is £134,000 !

You won't get it much cheaper if you only want 1 or a few and go through the local dealer.

Yes, even in my early days, I would create report's with a few local dealers/distributors for different big IC firms.  I got free access to local seminars and in the case of Altera, free Quartus/and it's predecessor's keys for a month at a time and dirt cheap smaller FPGA to help start me up until I purchased an authentic seat.

With the really big parts, they don't actually give the big discounts because of volume sales.  They are buying sockets on your boards.  They don't ever expect to sell hundreds of thousands, much less millions of these monster parts.  But every design win lets them boost the numbers for marketing purposes. 

[AK6DN]

I watched Phil's Lab's latest about his Zync Ultrascale+ project and decided to check out the part on Digikey. The top of the line Ultrascale+ part has 1700+ pins, 930K logic cells and costs over $43,000 USD and I'm pretty sure there are bigger FPGA's out there. What are these monsters used for? What are some real world examples of their use?

There are products that could use the resources of an ASIC in terms of logic, complexity, and performance, but the market for the product is low volume.
So incurring the NRE for an ASIC development is financially out of the question.
Using a very expensive FPGA is the alternative for a low volume product (ie in the 10s to 1000s of units) compared to the volume required (100K to 1Ms of units) to justify an ASIC.

[tom66]

Most expensive one  listed on Digikey is £134,000 !

They did have one at over £200k at one point but suspect they do not list it any more because you do not go through Digikey for purchases of that size.