If you use low-cost – er – cost-effective FPGAs, there’s great news. You’ll have more choices sometime next year. AMD has just provided more details on its Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family, based on TSMC’s 16nm FinFET process. These FPGAs will directly compete with Altera’s Agilex 3 FPGAs, when they appear.  When it declared its independence from Intel on February 29, Altera reiterated a commitment to extend the Agilex FPGA architecture down from the mid-range Agilex 5 parts to a new FPGA subfamily called Agilex 3. Last September, when Intel PSG fist pre-announced its Agilex 3 plans, I wrote:

Read More → "AMD announces I/O-heavy Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA subfamily for low-cost designs"

A Fable:

Once upon a time, in the incredibly wealthy Kingdom of Silicon, there lived a scrappy company named Duchess Altera, who shared the Duchy of FPGAs with an archrival named Duchess Xilinx. For more than three decades, Duchess Altera and Duchess Xilinx battled for control of the Duchy of FPGAs. Then, Duchess Altera forged an alliance with Archduke Intel, who ruled the much larger and much richer Grand Duchy of Microprocessors. Sometime later, Duchess Xilinx joined the House of Zen, which competed with Archduke Intel in the Grand Duchy … Read More → "FPGA maker Intel PSG spins out of Intel and adopts old name: Altera"