[Cryptech Tech] Survey of FPGA devices for the new board

[Joachim Strömbergson]

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Aloha!

Bernd Paysan wrote:
> My experience is also that Altera's tools are easier to use, while
> the devices themselves are roughly equal to Xilinx's offerings.

One thing worth noting is that if we go beyond Cyclone V C7 we need to
start using versions of Quartus that costs money. The Altera website is
down for maintenance(!) but I will check which version we need.

Also worth noting is that the prices drops off fairly rapidly with volume.

> If you run out of gates, it's a good idea to look at which parts of
> the design consume the most gates, and try to make them smaller (at
> cost of performance).

Yes, of course. And also see if we can share. Right now for example the
SHA-512 in the TRNG is exclusive. Unless you are doing lots of reseeding
it really spends most its live doing nothing.

But at this stage we want to know what device to to safely fit
everything we need based on the use cases that drives the design of the
new board. Then we cam start optimizing to see if we can move from C9 to
C7. The good thing with C9->C7 is that they are basically pin compatible
so it is fairly easy to just replace the design with the smaller version.

But I will do some more estimates on the required space when we have the
requirement specification so that I really know what we need inside the
FPGA. We also want to have something like 70% margin to not risk running
into routing problems. Since we wont have much I/Os and clock domains
and probbaly not run with a very high main clock, the tool will have
quite a lot of freedom to do placement to meet timimg.

- -- 
Med vänlig hälsning, Yours

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