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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

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I think you would be surprised to know a lot of the bigger FPGAs work exactly like that

You usually need a serial flash with the data, or load it on device boot (no persistent memory)

I think almost every FPGA is like that -- I think ones that have internal flash (like the Spartan-3AN) are still SRAM based and just have a flash chip in the package as well.

The only flash based programmable logic from Xilinx/Altera are CPLDs as far as I remember.

External SPI flash is pretty cheap even at low quantity (~$0.50 at qty 1 for 2Mbit, going down to the $0.30 range for low thousands)

Yeah, but FPGA dev boards usually have the required Flash chip integrated on the board rather than requiring you to supply your own.

Of course. Because it's a dev board

How big is the bitstream for a device like this?

True flash FPGAs do exist -- they're used when startup time is important. Microsemi has quite a few.

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