On Thursday, December 10, 2020 at 10:55:41 AM UTC-5, kkoorndyk wrote:
> They're a private company HQ'd in China so you're not likely to find much publicly available info on their financials. Based on their Crunchbase profile, news releases, and history of social media posts, it looks like they were founded in 2013 with first lines of FPGAs released in 2015. Looks like most of their management team has worked at Lattice in the past, which is interesting given how much their logos look alike.
>
> It certainly sounds like they're investing in new devices and tools, which seems to indicate a healthy trajectory. Not sure what qualifies a company as a "real FPGA company", but they're still quite a ways off from the big guys in terms of technology and product portfolio.
Well, things may have taken a turn for the worse. The US government has labeled them a Communist Chinese Military Company (CCMC). For the moment that only means people in the US are not allowed to trade their securities. But many listed as CCMCs are on "the Military End User List or the Entity List" which restricts sales and shipments of goods. I'm not certain what this means, but I think it puts me back to square one looking for an FPGA to use on my board.
1.0 mm 256 pin BGA is an option, but not so inexpensive. There's also a pricey 196 pin 1.0 mm BGA from Xilinx with a 6 kLUT Spartan 7 that would waste a bit less board space. Heck, that part has 52 pins on the outer ring alone, so it might be practical to ignore the inner I/Os eliminating a bunch of vias. Still, the power, ground, configuration and some other I/Os must be accessed no matter where in the package they are.
In case you couldn't tell, I'm not a big BGA fan.
--
Rick C.
-+ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
-+ Tesla referral code -
https://ts.la/richard11209