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Lattice FPGA

A project log for Random-Ass Breakouts

What's a breadboard?

jarrettJarrett 11/16/2018 at 23:142 Comments

Design courtesy of @Ted Yapo with his #Ugly FPGA Breakout 

I soldered on an LCMXO2-256HC, which is, hands-down, the cheapest fpga you can buy right now, at about $3 in singles. I bought a couple, and also an LCMXO2-1200HC, in case I need something beefier in the future. Same footprint, but more like $11.

I think these footprints might be 0805, but fuck tha police! I got 0603 components! They work fine.

Currently, I have no way of testing this breakout board, though! I don't have a lot of evenings to sit down and figure out the toolchain / programming strategies for a bit.

Discussions

Frank Buss wrote 09/17/2019 at 16:58 point

The Gowin FPGAs are cheaper. For example the GW1N-LV1LQ100 costs $1.84:

https://www.edgeelectronics.com/fpga/gw1n-lv1lq100c5-i4/

but it has 4 times the number of LUTs than your Lattice part. There are 2 threads on eevblog which discusses them:

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/fpga/gowin-fpga/

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontrollers/chinese-fpgas-sold-by-lcsc-have-anyone-tried-them/

But interestingly, at LCSC they are all marked as "Discontinued" now. So I guess maybe better to pay 2 dollars more, but then you can just buy it at Digikey or Mouser with thousands in stock, if you are using it for hobby projects. Might be different, if you plan to sell millions, then you could buy it from Gowin directly. Looks like they are mainly interested in big customers. I contacted them once, and they forwarded me to a distributor, which wanted to sell me minimum 100 pieces.

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Ryo wrote 12/18/2019 at 21:46 point

i think Gowin FPGAs (LV1LQ100 ), do not have design security / fuse bit to protect against copying ?

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