Pissed off with Xilinx - Spartan 3

Erik Walthinsen wrote:

> Jim Granville wrote:
>
>> Try mentioning this link, might hurry them along a bit...
>> http://www.altera.com/buy/devices/buy-devices.html
>
> Except that they have '0' stock of most chips themselves. ;-(
>
>> Xilinx only have CPLDs here :
>
> As of a month ago, they listed a reasonable selection of in-stock 
> Spartan3 parts for prototyping work.  Apparently they decided they 
> don't like people actually *buying* their parts.
>
> I'm pretty much newbie to FPGAs, but I've got in mind a decent-sized 
> project that needs quantity *1* of a TQ144 or PQ208 chip of no 
> particular size (an XC2S50 would be underutilized and running at 
> 48MHz) as glue between a bunch of parts.  Unless I can find a way to 
> get a part for this project, I'll be looking at other vendors.

Digi-Key stocks this exact part. OOPs, is is the XC2S50E.   I got 5 of 
them a month ago to start a migration
from 5 V Spartan parts.  I think they now have some Spartan-3 parts, too.

Jon

Erik,

What is vcolo.com doing with FPGAs?  Looks like you re-sell computer 
resources virtually?

See below,

Austin

Erik Walthinsen wrote:

> Austin Lesea wrote:
> 
>>> The parts are not discontinued.  Digikey carries them, and we still 
>>> sell them.  And, we still make them, too.  We use our website to 
>>> showcase the new products, not the old ones.
> 
> Then why, when I try to search for various part numbers found on Digikey 
> on Xilinx's site do I get no useful results? (specifically anything 
> under ~$50 as appropriate for my projects)  For the sole reason that ISE 
> runs on Linux I would prefer to use Xilinx parts.  But when Digikey is 
> the only way to get any parts in small quantity, and I can't even 
> determine if the parts they actually do sell have a hope of handling my 
> project, I start looking at putting up with Windoze and Quartus (better 
> interface than ISE anyway, from my limited experience) and going with 
> Altera parts.
> 
> Not to mention that all the parts on Digikey are afaict ludirously 
> expensive for their capbilities, because they are built with such old 
> processes.
> 
> Can some give an explanation as to why Digikey does not even offer the 
> newer parts in the first place?  I gather there are apparently problems 
> producing the chips in sufficient quantity, but that's never stopped 
> Digikey from at least listing a part as non-stock before.

All parts are in stock here at the factory (I checked).  That a 
distributor doesn't order them is of course troubling, and another 
issue.  That Digikey doesn't carry the latest and greatest products may 
be because they offer little to no support.  We prefer our distributors 
to earn their percentages (that they make on the parts).

Other distributors do not want to be undersold by someone who offers no 
services (and we don't see any benefit in that either).

If all you need are some samples, you should develop a better 
relationship with your local X distributor or X representative.

Hi Fred,

"Fred" <Fred@nospam.com> wrote in message
news:42a4814e$0$2594$da0feed9@news.zen.co.uk...
> 14 week lead time for samples for the XC3S200.  How can you prototype with
> that?
>
> It makes worry even more when it comes to manufacture where I might need
> quantity.

Wow!  I miss reading comp.arch.fpga's for a few days ...

SUMMARY:  Spartan-3 FPGAs are readily available.  To speed delivery of
Spartan-3 before 1-AUG-2005, append the part number with the four-number
code "0974".

THE DETAILS:
================================
I did some checking and from appearances, you're right.  But as the
illustrious U.S. radioman Paul Harvey used to say, "stay tuned for the rest
of the story."

Xilinx is transitioning the lower-density Spartan-3 FPGAs (XC3S50 through
XC3S1500) from the 200 mm wafer production line to the 300 mm line.  The
larger density Spartan-3 FPGAs (XC3S2000 through XC3S5000) are already built
exclusively on the 300 mm line.  Xilinx has a policy where we notify
customers 90 days in advance of such a change and we cannot ship product
from the new fab unless you specifically order us to.  This gives customers
90 days to evaluate the new material to see if it affects their production
systems.  The details are in the following change notice.
http://www.xilinx.com/bvdocs/notifications/xcn05009.pdf

Starting 1-AUG-2005, all orders will be shipped from the 300 mm line. Until
then, all production orders for lower-density Spartan-3 FPGAs are still
shipped from the 200 mm line.  As a consequence, lead times are artificially
increasing during the transition.  There are plenty of 300 mm devices in
stock.  However, due to our notification policy, we can't ship you one of
the 300 mm devices unless you specifically ask.  You can dramatically
improve delivery by appending the part number with the four-number code
"0974".  For example, "XC3S200-4PQ208C" would become "XC3S200-4PQ208C0974".

I've also copied the various Xilinx logistics groups to make sure that our
distribution product managers are aware of this issue.  The lead-times need
to be updated to reflect the 1-AUG-2005 change-over date.

While I have your attention (I hope), I'd also like to promote a free
feature from the Xilinx MySupport web site that automatically notifies you
be E-mail whenever Xilinx issues a change notice.  You can also sign up to
receive notices whenever we update a data sheet, application note, errata,
etc.  Just visit the following link.
http://www.xilinx.com/xlnx/xil_ans_display.jsp?getPagePath=18683

---------------------------------
Steven K. Knapp
Applications Manager, Xilinx Inc.
General Products Division
Spartan-3/-3E FPGAs
http://www.xilinx.com/spartan3e
---------------------------------
The Spartan(tm)-3 Generation:  The World's Lowest-Cost FPGAs.

Hi Fred,

"Fred" <Fred@nospam.com> wrote in message
news:42a4814e$0$2594$da0feed9@news.zen.co.uk...
> 14 week lead time for samples for the XC3S200.  How can you prototype with
> that?
>
> It makes worry even more when it comes to manufacture where I might need
> quantity.

Wow!  I miss reading comp.arch.fpga's for a few days ...

SUMMARY:  Spartan-3 FPGAs are readily available.  To speed delivery of
Spartan-3 before 1-AUG-2005, append the part number with the four-number
code "0974".

THE DETAILS:
================================
I did some checking and from appearances, you're right.  But as the
illustrious U.S. radioman Paul Harvey used to say, "stay tuned for the rest
of the story."

Xilinx is transitioning the lower-density Spartan-3 FPGAs (XC3S50 through
XC3S1500) from the 200 mm wafer production line to the 300 mm line.  The
larger density Spartan-3 FPGAs (XC3S2000 through XC3S5000) are already built
exclusively on the 300 mm line.  Xilinx has a policy where we notify
customers 90 days in advance of such a change and we cannot ship product
from the new fab unless you specifically order us to.  This gives customers
90 days to evaluate the new material to see if it affects their production
systems.  The details are in the following change notice.
http://www.xilinx.com/bvdocs/notifications/xcn05009.pdf

Starting 1-AUG-2005, all orders will be shipped from the 300 mm line. Until
then, all production orders for lower-density Spartan-3 FPGAs are still
shipped from the 200 mm line.  As a consequence, lead times are artificially
increasing during the transition.  There are plenty of 300 mm devices in
stock.  However, due to our notification policy, we can't ship you one of
the 300 mm devices unless you specifically ask.  You can dramatically
improve delivery by appending the part number with the four-number code
"0974".  For example, "XC3S200-4PQ208C" would become "XC3S200-4PQ208C0974".

I've also copied the various Xilinx logistics groups to make sure that our
distribution product managers are aware of this issue.  The lead-times need
to be updated to reflect the 1-AUG-2005 change-over date.

While I have your attention (I hope), I'd also like to promote a free
feature from the Xilinx MySupport web site that automatically notifies you
be E-mail whenever Xilinx issues a change notice.  You can also sign up to
receive notices whenever we update a data sheet, application note, errata,
etc.  Just visit the following link.
http://www.xilinx.com/xlnx/xil_ans_display.jsp?getPagePath=18683

---------------------------------
Steven K. Knapp
Applications Manager, Xilinx Inc.
General Products Division
Spartan-3/-3E FPGAs
http://www.xilinx.com/spartan3e
---------------------------------
The Spartan(tm)-3 Generation:  The World's Lowest-Cost FPGAs.

Hi Fred,

"Fred" <Fred@nospam.com> wrote in message
news:42a4814e$0$2594$da0feed9@news.zen.co.uk...
> 14 week lead time for samples for the XC3S200.  How can you prototype with
> that?
>
> It makes worry even more when it comes to manufacture where I might need
> quantity.

Wow!  I miss reading comp.arch.fpga's for a few days ...

SUMMARY:  Spartan-3 FPGAs are readily available.  To speed delivery of
Spartan-3 before 1-AUG-2005, append the part number with the four-number
code "0974".

THE DETAILS:
================================
I did some checking and from appearances, you're right.  But as the
illustrious U.S. radioman Paul Harvey used to say, "stay tuned for the rest
of the story."

Xilinx is transitioning the lower-density Spartan-3 FPGAs (XC3S50 through
XC3S1500) from the 200 mm wafer production line to the 300 mm line.  The
larger density Spartan-3 FPGAs (XC3S2000 through XC3S5000) are already built
exclusively on the 300 mm line.  Xilinx has a policy where we notify
customers 90 days in advance of such a change and we cannot ship product
from the new fab unless you specifically order us to.  This gives customers
90 days to evaluate the new material to see if it affects their production
systems.  The details are in the following change notice.
http://www.xilinx.com/bvdocs/notifications/xcn05009.pdf

Starting 1-AUG-2005, all orders will be shipped from the 300 mm line. Until
then, all production orders for lower-density Spartan-3 FPGAs are still
shipped from the 200 mm line.  As a consequence, lead times are artificially
increasing during the transition.  There are plenty of 300 mm devices in
stock.  However, due to our notification policy, we can't ship you one of
the 300 mm devices unless you specifically ask.  You can dramatically
improve delivery by appending the part number with the four-number code
"0974".  For example, "XC3S200-4PQ208C" would become "XC3S200-4PQ208C0974".

I've also copied the various Xilinx logistics groups to make sure that our
distribution product managers are aware of this issue.  The lead-times need
to be updated to reflect the 1-AUG-2005 change-over date.

While I have your attention (I hope), I'd also like to promote a free
feature from the Xilinx MySupport web site that automatically notifies you
be E-mail whenever Xilinx issues a change notice.  You can also sign up to
receive notices whenever we update a data sheet, application note, errata,
etc.  Just visit the following link.
http://www.xilinx.com/xlnx/xil_ans_display.jsp?getPagePath=18683

---------------------------------
Steven K. Knapp
Applications Manager, Xilinx Inc.
General Products Division
Spartan-3/-3E FPGAs
http://www.xilinx.com/spartan3e
---------------------------------
The Spartan(tm)-3 Generation:  The World's Lowest-Cost FPGAs.

Erik Walthinsen <omega@pdxcolo.net> wrote:
> Jim Granville wrote:
> > Try mentioning this link, might hurry them along a bit...
> > http://www.altera.com/buy/devices/buy-devices.html
> Except that they have '0' stock of most chips themselves. ;-(
> 
> > Xilinx only have CPLDs here :
> As of a month ago, they listed a reasonable selection of in-stock 
> Spartan3 parts for prototyping work.  Apparently they decided they don't 
> like people actually *buying* their parts.
> 
> I'm pretty much newbie to FPGAs, but I've got in mind a decent-sized 
> project that needs quantity *1* of a TQ144 or PQ208 chip of no 
> particular size (an XC2S50 would be underutilized and running at 48MHz) 
> as glue between a bunch of parts.  Unless I can find a way to get a part 
> for this project, I'll be looking at other vendors.  This particular 
> project *could* turn into a very large-scale production, and with Xilinx 
> recently dropping any sales of small quantity, plus the utter inability 
> to get the parts anywhere else, they could very easily fall out of 
> consideration in my design process.  If I can find an appropriate Altera 
> part at their store that's actually in stock, or something that Digikey 
> carries, I'll be going with their parts.  I like Quartus better than 
> ISE, but I prefer ISE running on Linux...
> 
> It's also entertaining to try to find any of the Xilinx parts that 
> Digikey actually *does* carry on the Xilinx site.  AFAICT every part 
> they actually have has been discontinued long ago.
> 
> Really pathetic, IMO.

-- 
	Sander

+++ Out of cheese error +++

Erik Walthinsen wrote:

> For the record I have nothing against
> Altera, but without Quartus running "easily" in Linux, they're mostly
> out of the running otherwise.  I plan on actually using Makefiles and
> CVS to manage heavily co-dependent C and Verilog, and that gets almost
> prohibitively annoying and hard with Windoze.

This has little to do with xilinx vs. altera, but if all of your tools
for any technology are command-line capable under windows, you can use
cygwin to get yourself what is essentially a unix environment with a
real shell for scripting and make, gcc, etc.

The only real problems I had were that if something crashed I sometimes
had to kill it from the windows task manager rather than the shell, and
occasionally if I tried to build someone's generic unix package to run
locally under cygwin there were some header file problems with
different handling of signals or something (cygwin is a unique *nix
flavor, it's not precisely the same programming model as linux).

On Wed, 08 Jun 2005 14:48:43 -0700, Austin Lesea <austin@xilinx.com> wrote:

>Erik,
>
>What is vcolo.com doing with FPGAs?  Looks like you re-sell computer 
>resources virtually?
>
>See below,
>
>Austin
>
>Erik Walthinsen wrote:
>
>> Austin Lesea wrote:
>> 
>>>> The parts are not discontinued.  Digikey carries them, and we still 
>>>> sell them.  And, we still make them, too.  We use our website to 
>>>> showcase the new products, not the old ones.
>> 
>> Then why, when I try to search for various part numbers found on Digikey 
>> on Xilinx's site do I get no useful results? (specifically anything 
>> under ~$50 as appropriate for my projects)  For the sole reason that ISE 
>> runs on Linux I would prefer to use Xilinx parts.  But when Digikey is 
>> the only way to get any parts in small quantity, and I can't even 
>> determine if the parts they actually do sell have a hope of handling my 
>> project, I start looking at putting up with Windoze and Quartus (better 
>> interface than ISE anyway, from my limited experience) and going with 
>> Altera parts.
>> 
>> Not to mention that all the parts on Digikey are afaict ludirously 
>> expensive for their capbilities, because they are built with such old 
>> processes.
>> 
>> Can some give an explanation as to why Digikey does not even offer the 
>> newer parts in the first place?  I gather there are apparently problems 
>> producing the chips in sufficient quantity, but that's never stopped 
>> Digikey from at least listing a part as non-stock before.
>
>All parts are in stock here at the factory (I checked).  That a 
>distributor doesn't order them is of course troubling, and another 
>issue.  That Digikey doesn't carry the latest and greatest products may 
>be because they offer little to no support.  We prefer our distributors 
>to earn their percentages (that they make on the parts).
>
>Other distributors do not want to be undersold by someone who offers no 
>services (and we don't see any benefit in that either).
>
>If all you need are some samples, you should develop a better 
>relationship with your local X distributor or X representative.

Much of the discussion recently on availability seems to be from people who will only ever want
small quantities - distributors tend not to be interested in such customers....
As Xilinx already has a web-shop set up, it seems that this would be the ideal way to make small
quantities available. 

Hi Erik,

> For the record I have nothing against Altera, but without Quartus running
> "easily" in Linux, they're mostly out of the running otherwise.

What's your problem with Quartus on Linux? Since 4.0 it's been running
flawlessly (well, as flawless as its Windows counterpart) and quickly on
RedHat, Gentoo, Suse, and even Knoppix (i.e. Debian) in this little
computer room. Four completely different distributions.

The only thing you may need to do is to comment out a line in the
adm/qenv.csh file (around line 110), but only if you're not running Red Hat
but _are_ running a 2.6 kernel with a glibc that has NPTL support compiled
in.

The only trouble I'm having is when somebody sends me a project to work on
that was created on Windows and the filename does not exactly match the
module name, but that's mainly an irritation.

Also, the tools are TCL scriptable, generate Makefile-friendly .done files -
so what's your problem?

Best regards,


Ben

Austin Lesea wrote:
> What is vcolo.com doing with FPGAs?  Looks like you re-sell computer 
> resources virtually?
Nothing.  I'm starting to experiment with FPGA stuff on my own, but I 
co-own vcolo.com and that's the address I use.

<OT type="plug">FWIW for anyone who might be interested, we user 
User-Mode Linux to give customers everything from the kernel down 
totally dedicated and isolated, so you can run *any* [legal] software 
you want, unlike a classic "VPS" (e.g. Virtuozzo) or web hosting. 
Prices reflect the shared-resources nature, but performance tends not to 
show it.</OT>

> If all you need are some samples, you should develop a better 
> relationship with your local X distributor or X representative.
The problem is that I don't *have* a distributor or representative. I 
have Digikey, Mouser, Newark, etc.

I'm screwing around with developing stuff with FPGAs because it's cool 
and I have some product ideas I want to see if I can make work.  I need 
q.1 of a given part as appropriate for my prototyping (think home-etched 
boards, maybe a toaster-oven soldering kit if I can't pull off hand 
soldering of TQFP/SSOP stuff), using free tools like ISE.  *IF* my idea 
becomes viable, whichever FPGA gets used in my prototype will likely be 
the one used in production.  I have several ideas that AFAICT are *very* 
commercially viable, if I can build them.  Being a software guy, I've 
got a lot of hardware stuff still to learn, but if I can't even get 
parts, I'm not gonna get anywhere in the first place.

Someone else mentioned that Digikey seems to have some XC2S parts 
finally, which is good, but comments elsewhere indicated that the 
startup sequencing of the Spartan2's can be more of a pain to deal with 
than the 3-rail requirement of the Spartan3's...  They're also much 
lower density, which may not be a problem in some of my design ideas but 
will be in others.