FPGAs vs. Microcontrollers vs. ASICs

nandland.com

4 points·smartmic··4 comments

Between FPGAs with all the special purpose cores, routing, etc... and CPUs/GPUs is a no-man's land. It's been ignored because ASICs are expensive, and FPGAs are good at the niche they get used for.

I hope to plant a new chip design there, the BitGrid, which is an FPGA stripped to the basics... a grid of universal cells based on 4x4 bit LUTs, each latched, and a bit of routing logic to maximize utilization (i.e. allow a cell to send 2 or more bits to a neighbor, instead of just 1 as I had previously envisioned).

I'll be buying a slot or two in the next TinyTapeout to see how it works. If my intuition is right, and the performance is good enough, it'll be a slow FPGA, but way faster than a CPU, and yet another category of Turing Machine.

It's 2024.

Cheap access to powerful FPGAs is available now.

Either go with this Sipheed GoWin FPGA boards or get one of these recycled Bitcoin miner controller boards (Zynq 7010) or reverse engineered LED controllers from ColorLight/Linsn which use a Spartan/Lattice.

I started writing a reply in disagreement, lamenting on the long-gone the pre-COVID times when we were buying sub-$10 Max10 devices, and bitching how Intel killed Altera, letting Xilinx to jack-up the prices.

Boy, am I happy I decided to do some googling before pressing send…

Although Xilinx indeed has jacked up the prices, the sub-$10 Altera category is still alive and well.

Furthermore, both Lattice and Renesas have devices in sub-$5 category.

For super cheap programmable logic, Renesas has a sub-$1 simple programmable logic devices.

So much options out there…

FPGAs doing microcontroller things uses a bit more power than a microcontroller, but microcontrollers doing FPGA things, takes significantly more power than an FPGA.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com