Renesas introduces sub 50 cents FPGA family with Yosys-based development tools
1–10 of 15 posts
Re: Renesas introduces sub 50 cents FPGA family with Yosys-based development tools
#25 days ago, 84 comments, a lot a lot a lot of skepticism against this company's ability to stay on a good path, not mess stuff up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29261574
here's to hoping! very good that they're trying to leverage public tooling/infrastructure. definitely an area that, with more competition, could reinvigorate & revitalize computing in powerful ways... especially if we start seeing more competition that also has high speed io too, imo, not quite present here at this ultra low price point.
the greenpak line seemed super super cool though. really cool ideas & products, way more mixed signal in a tiny cheap package than a classic fpga would have. i have little idea how capable or not it really is, given that it's a truly tiny product. but even if this never becomes a hundreds of cell line with decent io, it still feels like it has a ton going for it, and i hope it remains actively developed, very much, especially if communal tool chains get to play.
Re: Renesas introduces sub 50 cents FPGA family with Yosys-based development tools
#3Slightly offtopic, but perhaps someone here can shed some light:
What are the best hobbyist use cases for FPGAs? Most of the stuff I do can be accomplished with microcontrollers or embedded systems like RPi, I imagine FPGAs become more important when you're doing things like DSP or hard realtime requirements, which don't come up super often in hobbyist projects.
I'd like to do more hobby projects involving FPGAs so what sorts of things might low cost FPGAs be useful for in that realm?
I'm thinking of building a clock that integrates a local atomic oscillator, outputs from an embedded system running ntpd, and drives a local VFD as a sort of orientation project.
Re: Renesas introduces sub 50 cents FPGA family with Yosys-based development tools
#4Slightly offtopic, but perhaps someone here can shed some light: What are the best hobbyist use cases for FPGAs? Most of the stuff I do can be accomplished with microcontrollers or embedded systems like RPi, I imagine FPGAs become more important when you're doing things like DSP or hard realtime requirements, which don't come up super often in hobbyist projects. I'd like to do more hobby projects involving FPGAs so w…
A quick example might be a device which outputs a channel of audio per pin using super fast pwm
Re: Renesas introduces sub 50 cents FPGA family with Yosys-based development tools
#5Slightly offtopic, but perhaps someone here can shed some light: What are the best hobbyist use cases for FPGAs? Most of the stuff I do can be accomplished with microcontrollers or embedded systems like RPi, I imagine FPGAs become more important when you're doing things like DSP or hard realtime requirements, which don't come up super often in hobbyist projects. I'd like to do more hobby projects involving FPGAs so w…
I'm using an ice40 FPGA to make a camera. It reads an image from an image sensor, writes it to an SDRAM, and then writes the SDRAM content to an SD card. Doing all that with a regular CPU would require lots of specialized peripherals (especially since the data rate is 1.2 Gbps -- 12 bits per pixel @ 100 MHz). An FPGA can handle all the requirements quite well.
Re: Renesas introduces sub 50 cents FPGA family with Yosys-based development tools
#6Slightly offtopic, but perhaps someone here can shed some light: What are the best hobbyist use cases for FPGAs? Most of the stuff I do can be accomplished with microcontrollers or embedded systems like RPi, I imagine FPGAs become more important when you're doing things like DSP or hard realtime requirements, which don't come up super often in hobbyist projects. I'd like to do more hobby projects involving FPGAs so w…
Another quick idea is a cnc positioning stage that uses optical interfrerometry to measure distance moved. Really anything involving fast fringe counting in an interference pattern. It might be something like a new fringe for every micron of movement, so tracking something moving 1 m/s will require fringe counting at about 1 MHz, and the ADC sampling rate will need to be several times this in practice because errors are cumulative.
Re: Renesas introduces sub 50 cents FPGA family with Yosys-based development tools
#75 days ago, 84 comments, a lot a lot a lot of skepticism against this company's ability to stay on a good path, not mess stuff up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29261574 here's to hoping! very good that they're trying to leverage public tooling/infrastructure. definitely an area that, with more competition, could reinvigorate & revitalize computing in powerful ways... especially if we start seeing more competi…
It was not known then if and how open-source tools would be used.
Re: Renesas introduces sub 50 cents FPGA family with Yosys-based development tools
#85 days ago, 84 comments, a lot a lot a lot of skepticism against this company's ability to stay on a good path, not mess stuff up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29261574 here's to hoping! very good that they're trying to leverage public tooling/infrastructure. definitely an area that, with more competition, could reinvigorate & revitalize computing in powerful ways... especially if we start seeing more competi…
It was not known then if and how open-source tools would be used.
the comments there already mention that yosys is used, and this article does not go into any more detail about that.
Re: Renesas introduces sub 50 cents FPGA family with Yosys-based development tools
#9GCC brought good compilers out of the shackles of the proprietary world. Linux did the same for UNIX users. A few years later, Arduino did the same with micro controllers. Now is the time for FPGA.
Re: Renesas introduces sub 50 cents FPGA family with Yosys-based development tools
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was not known then if and how open-source tools would be used.
the comments there already mention that yosys is used, and this article does not go into any more detail about that.
There were hopes and assumptions. A comment with specific facts was added two days ago, I just saw it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29292603