[Cryptech Tech] Alpha board strategy

[Joachim Strömbergson]

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Aloha!

Шатов Павел wrote:
>> And just to make it easier for others to replicate what we do in
>> order to build trust or try to contribute the tool becomes a
>> problem if the cost serious dough.
> Both ISE and Quartus are $2,995.

Depends if you go node locked or not. Node locked Quartus is 1995 USD
and floating is 3995 USD. And that is fairly serious dough if you are
not planning to do a single board or so.


> I mean that if we choose Altera's devices, we can develop Alpha Board
> in such a way, that it will accept both A7 (largest device that is
> available with free license) and A9 (largest available device). End
> users can decide on their own what chip to solder.

Yes, in-family pin compatibility is one of the good things with FPGAs.
And that it also often scales downwards (depending on which device in
the family you start out with.) If one has a use case that needs less
resources one can do cost reduction fairly easily.


> My suggestion is to have one board that will suit users willing to
> use cheap FPGA and free license as well as users willing to use
> larger FPGA and paid subscription license.

Yes, that is a very good point. But it doesn't change the fact that we
imho want to be able to meet the full set of functionality for our
primary use cases with a lot of possible headroom for the first version
of the board. Adding a second set of pads and traces for a second FPGA
on the first alpha board (and possibly keeping it on later revisions) is
a cheap way to do that. A way to support building big designs without
the cost of the tools.

- -- 
Med vänlig hälsning, Yours

Joachim Strömbergson - Alltid i harmonisk svängning.
========================================================================
 Joachim Strömbergson          Secworks AB          joachim at secworks.se
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