Products with PCIe (PCI Express) and high speed interfaces like 10G Ethernet, SATA, HDMI, USB 3.0 and higher, Thunderbolt.
Most of the ASICs with these SerDes interfaces are not for sale on the open market, only for OEM who buy MOQ of millions.
Take for example the Raspberry PI SBCs. The Raspberry Pi only got PCIe very late (compute model 4), influencer Jeff unlocked them with a lot of difficulty https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com but you still can't buy these cheap microprocessors from Broadcom.
The reason is that no cheap PCIe chips are available for hobbyists and small company buyers (below a million dollars).
'Cheap' FPGA's starting at $200+ where and still are the only PCIe devices for sale to anyone. If you want to nitpick, a few low speed Serdes are available in $27 ECP5 FPGA's, but no 10 Gbps and higher.
Another example, I sell $130 switches with 100 Gbps switching speeds and PCIe 4x8 and QSFP28 optics. But you can't buy the AWS/Amazon ASIC chips on this board anywhere, nor their competitors chips from Broadcom, Intel, MicroSemi/Microchip, Marvell.
I went as high as Intel's vice president and also their highest level account manager VPs and still got no answer on how to buy their ASIC switches or FPGAs.
Similar issues as Artix Ultrascale+ where the small print says " PCIe Gen4 is available in AU10P and AU15P in the FFVB676 package. AU10P and AU15P in other packages support Gen3x8.". Same die for all these FPGAs but not same speeds at given prices. Most of the die will be disabled, 'binned'.
So Spartan 7 Ultrascale+ can theoretically support 8 lanes of PCIe Gen 4.0, but if they actually do at the price you pay is unclear and also if the PCIe 4 IP is free or very expensive and only available in the expensive toolchain under NDA?
Finally, I waited years for this. I could only use the Kitex line. Big question is will these Spartan Ultrascale+ with tranceivers and PCIe 4.0 be cheaper or more expensive?
They have strong competition from Lattice and I really thought they had ceded the low-end to them already. For the PCIe chips you can figure out where the pricing must fall for a certain feature set, but I'd be surprised if the cheapest PCIe 4.0 part in the Spartan US+ family is under $500. Consider the Lattice Avant-X series as competitive reference:
https://www.mouser.com/c/semiconductors/programmable-logic-i...
Strong competition from Lattice? I might be missing something, but AFAIK Lattice certuspro-nx FPGA's are more expesive and so is the synthesis software.
When you need to decide on what FPGA line you are going to base your products on, you certainly want to know years in advance what new models will obsolete your FPGA products. However, you don't just want to know their specifications but also their price.
But the flip side is most of them tell you ahead of time whether something is recommended for new designs, and how long they will guarantee production for.
Which is much more important.
In this day and age with FPGA companies being merged and spun out left and right, i doubt anyone relies on the future line announcements this second.
In more normal times I agree you want to know if you are going down a dead end path.
The arguments from the abstract of this paper have been refuted by Attojoule Optoelectronics for Low-Energy Information Processing and Communications: a Tutorial Review [1] and several other papers.
Of course the arguments of [15] in the paper are the main refutation. Paraphrasing: Optical transistors will need to match all these criteria before they can compete with bulk CMOS. They don't and physics predicts they won't anytime soon. We will replace wires with optics though [1].
This discussion started in 1959 when Feynman pointed out we eventually will create things at atomic sizes with elementary particles [2].
[2] There is Plenty of Room
at the Bottom -Richard P. Feynman
(Dated: Dec. 1959).
Hello Morphle, I tried to email you regarding the post you replied to a good while back about an ISP-related post. It got bounced from the ziggo.nl address. Have an updated contact point?
I have updated my contact info if you still want to chat.
By 2030 we will have progressed to a few atoms per transistor in bulk CMOS, to wafer scale integration [3] and probably replaced most metal wires with free space optics [2]. We will see the first mass-manufactured SFQ [1] and RSFQ [4] superconducting Josephson junctions. Maybe we will see the first carbon nanotubes and superconducting circuits [5].
Xerox made a ROI of 20000% on the laser printer alone [1]. A better version lecture Alan did for Ycombinator startups [2] but doesn't focus on the return of investment.
From my few hours of research on Xerox PARC, the laser printer did make a huge return (as you note, correctly); it's just "typical Xerox" that the engineers who invented LASER printing (i.e. using a laser to scan) also had to sit on their invention for years because the executive/sales teams didn't believe in an already-functional technology (the first decade of Xerox "non-ink printers" used visible light; the laser literally had to be forced into the Xerox equipment by R&D..!
I also sell cheap $150 10 Gbps and 25 Gbps QSFP28 switches but they are only partially open source.
They still sell some of the NetFPGA models, very pricy [2].
There are a few Chinese and Russian switches but you can't buy them anymore because of the war.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Merik-Voswinkel/publica...
[2] https://netfpga.org