Re: Insight board (was Re: Yet Another RISC Design (YA RD-1A)) | FPGA-CPU

> I hope this is not the NEW trend in marketing. > We can sell you a chip for $19.95 but you have a > $49.99 license fee to use the latest motherboard bus and $35. specific > connector. Let's not look a gift horse in the mouth. I am delighted to find a board with a 32-bit SDRAM memory channel and a decent sized Spartan-II that is so reasonably priced. $145 probably represents a break-even price taking into account design, test, manufacturing, docs, fulfilment, etc. The additional price tiers for the PCI core IP, driver dev tools, and one day of tech support seem very reasonable and I am sure many customers will avail themselves of these kits. (I read in a message just arrived from Will Cummings that these kits include the "right to use the IP for multiple units of a single production design" in which case they are an excellent value.) You are always free to write your own PCI core! Myself, I would easily burn many times the kit prices doing so. Speaking of core licensing fees, here is my take on some cogent analysis from Tom Cantrell of Circuit Cellar. In the old days, chip vendors were also the IP developers and the EDA tools developers. Nowadays, we have specialized fab companies (TSMC), IP companies (ARM, MIPS, Gray Research LLC :-) ), and tools companies (Mentor, Cadence, etc.), and combinations of these (Intel). You can buy IP bundled with hardware (Intel), bundled with your tools (EDA companies), or separately (IP providers). Enter the FPGA vendors (Xilinx, Altera). They have an opportunity to seize upon a unique business model. Take Altera Nios. The Nios development kit is relatively inexpensive (~$1000) and they will supposedly issue you a license to use the Nios core *in Altera FPGAs* for $0. The more instances you make, the more programmable logic they sell. They make up the cost of developing, testing, supporting, documenting, etc. the IP in device sales (which also simplifies the accounting). This business model gives these vendors a giant, unassailable advantage over third party IP vendors. The latter can never compete on price, because the FPGA vendors can always price their IP down to $0 and happily make up any lost revenue with further sales of CLBs. Therefore a third party IP vendor can only compete on value, quality, and innovation. For example, in the Altera CPU cores market, which includes the $0 Nios core family, one can only compete with a different value proposition, perhaps instruction set compatibility with a legacy ISA, or perhaps by offering a core which is dramatically smaller and faster than Nios. In the latter case, if your core uses $2 less programmable logic than the FPGA vendor's does, then it may have a value of $2/unit to a customer. Or not. It also depends on which vendor(s) establish a larger value chain of experts, plug-ins, etc. As Cantrell writes in "Excalibur Marks the Spot" (http://www.chipcenter.com/circuitcellar/august00/c0800su1.htm), "Remember that the cost of any chip is comprised of two parts-what it costs to make, sell, and support the silicon, and the value of the design (i.e., IP). As a silicon supplier, Altera has the ability to hide the IP cost in the chip price. Independent IP providers have no such luxury, short of messy and unpopular royalty schemes. Also, the free IP news may perk the interest of lawyers, similar to how MP3 got the recording industry riled up. I look forward to reading the fine print in the Nios license." "Such a great business model" -- my LCD "hello world" message from my afternoon at the Altera Nios Hands-on Workshop. Eventually there will also be a number of suppliers of high-quality free IP. This will drive down the price of "me too" equivalent-quality commercial IP except when propped up by artificial means. Even in that world, I think there will still be an interesting market for unique or highly-optimized commercial IP. Jan Gray Gray Research LLC

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Discussion Groups | FPGA-CPU | Re: Insight board (was Re: Yet Another RISC Design (YA RD-1A))

Re: Insight board (was Re: Yet Another RISC Design (YA RD-1A)) - Ben Franchuk - Oct 1 21:13:00 2000

Re: Insight board (was Re: Yet Another RISC Design (YA RD-1A)) - Ben Franchuk - Oct 1 21:45:00 2000

of Insight boards and IP business models - Jan Gray - Oct 2 14:44:00 2000