New Yorke chip in hardware

[Jonathan Busby]

(07-04-2020 11:31 PM)BruceH Wrote:  Following on from the "New Yorke" thread in the other forum, I wondered how feasible it would be to get Google to make it for us?

Well, I really don't think Google's offer is worth it. It's *much* easier to use a low power FPGA, such as one from Microchip Technologies or Lattice Semiconductor.

With an FPGA you have most of the capabilities of something like a "standard cell" ASIC, but with the ability to re-configure the FPGA to any circuit / netlist you want ( within limits ) without having to actually fab anything.

Modern FPGAs are quite powerful and feature rich. Take for example Xilinx : With their "Artix-7" "low power" FPGA family, you get, depending on the model, several Mbits of block and distributed RAM, multiple configurable clock domains with Digital Clock Managers, configurable I/O, DSP functionality via DSP blocks / "slices", and much more.

The problem with Xilinx "low power" FPGAs is that Xilinx considers "low power" to be in the ~25 milli-amp range for *quiescent* current draw, not to mention active current draw ( And this makes me sad because a lot of my designs use Xilinx FPGAs ). If you're willing to sacrifice some functionality and features, then my choice would be the Lattice Semiconductor iCE40 UltraLite UL1K FPGA. It's based on 28 nm process technology with about a 35 µA quiescent current draw, so it blows away Google's 130 nm offering. The logic cells are somewhat simpler than Xilinx : You get a flip-flop with an enable and clock-enable input, one 4-input LUT and fast carry logic. The FPGA also has around 56 kbits ( ~6.84 kBytes ) of block RAM, configurable I/O blocks and two oscillators ( It lacks Xilinx's powerful DCMs ).

With the Google offering, Google has to *select* your RTL code and it has to be open source. Also, even if they do select your code, it has to be in Git repo ( I prefer SVN ) and they'll only fab up to about 100 parts.

With the Lattice FPGA solution, you get free EDA software ( Lattice Diamond ) and the dev board only costs a little over $100 USD ( of which I have a few ).

IMHO, Google's offering is just a publicity stunt

Regards,

Jonathan