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Appendix B details the hidden costs in making a board vs. using a commercial off-the-shelf board including discussions about risk, wastage, support, documentation and warranty. The challenges of making our own boards will not be repeated here but it is worth reminding ourselves that these items apply to a greater or lesser degree to our choice of commercial boards too, albeit, many are outsourced to the board provider.
We should recall that total cost of ownership of a board and its initial purchase price are rather different things. Balanced against initial capital cost is the ability to reuse across multiple projects and the risk that the board will not perform as required. It may not be sensible to risk a multi-year, multi-million dollar SoC project on an apparently cheap board.
Of particular note is the robustness of the boards. It is probable that multiple prototype platforms will be built and most may be sent to other end-users, possibly in remote locations. Some FPGA-based prototyping projects even require that the board be deployed in situ in an environment similar to the final silicon e.g., in-car or in a customer or field location. It is important that the prototyping platform is both reliable and robust enough to survive the journey.
Recommendation: boards which have a proven track record of off-site deployment and reliability will pay back an investment sooner than a board that is in constant need of attention to keep it operational. The vendor should be willing to warranty their boards for immediate replacement from stock if they are found to be unreliable or unfit for use during any given warranty period.
Vendors differentiate their boards by using leading-edge technology to ensure best performance and economies of scale. However, these latest generation FPGAs are typically in short supply during their early production ramp-up, therefore, a significant commercial difference between board vendors is their ability to secure sufficient FPGA devices in order to ensure delivery to their customers. While some board vendors may have enough FPGAs to make demonstrations and low volume shipments, they must generally be a high-volume customer of the FPGA vendors themselves in order to guarantee their own device availability. This availability is particularly important if a prototyping project is mid-stream and a new need for boards is recognized, perhaps for increased software validation capability.
Manufacturer:Xilinx
Product Categories: CPLDs
Lifecycle:Active Active
RoHS:
Manufacturer:Xilinx
Product Categories: FPGAs
Lifecycle:Active Active
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Manufacturer:Xilinx
Product Categories:
Lifecycle:Obsolete -
RoHS: No RoHS
Manufacturer:Xilinx
Product Categories:
Lifecycle:Obsolete -
RoHS:
Manufacturer:Xilinx
Product Categories: Embedded - FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Array)
Lifecycle:Active Active
RoHS:
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