Electro-ramblings

In his blog on EDN's website, Michael Santarini is asking for help figuring out the vapour-ware from the real world when it comes to FPGA silicon.

As we move into 2007, I’d like to ask for your help. One of the biggest issues I face in covering the FPGA industry is being able to tell who really has working silicon and who doesn’t; which products work well in the field and which products don’t.

Mike was putting together EDN's top 100 hot products of 2006, and faced some problems over whether to include certain devices or not. Altera's Stratix III FPGAs, for example, were included, even though there is no silicon until later this year, while a Xilinx part was also included, but with no third party reports of silicon.

I elected both products largely on a leap of faith.

The programmable logic industry, and others like EDA, goes through phases when it comes to product releases. A few years ago the FPGA companies were pretty good: only making announcements when they had silicon, even if it was only engineering samples. Nowadays it seems the style is to announce a year ahead of silicon.

So please help Mike by telling him about silicon you have seen and used.