FPGA Central

In my actual design I'm using an Altera APEX20KE with 200,000 gates.
In my next (larger) design I want to use an newer and maybe cheaper FPGA.
I don't want to change to an other vendor, I intend to use an Altera FPGA.
Which one shall I use???
My first choice was a CYCLONE, which is much cheaper, but is this familie
powerful enough compared to an APEX20KE???
My second choice was a STRATIX, which is rather expensive???

Thank you for your help, Manfred

Hello,

I assume you are using an Apex 20K200E which has 8320 LEs.
Both the Cyclone EP1C20 and EP2C20 have more than twice the
number of LEs and RAM. The EP1C20 has slightly more resources
but the EP2C20 has embedded multipliers. You will have to look
at your other project requirements to see which is best. There
are larger members of the Cyclone II family in case you need
even more resources.

Daniel Lang

"Manfred Balik" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:43268449$0$12642$[email protected] ...
> In my actual design I'm using an Altera APEX20KE with 200,000 gates.
> In my next (larger) design I want to use an newer and maybe cheaper FPGA.
> I don't want to change to an other vendor, I intend to use an Altera FPGA.
> Which one shall I use???
> My first choice was a CYCLONE, which is much cheaper, but is this familie
> powerful enough compared to an APEX20KE???
> My second choice was a STRATIX, which is rather expensive???
>
> Thank you for your help, Manfred
>

Eithout knowing anything about your application,...

I believe that if you managed to run things in a 20KE, you will
definetly be able to run it in a CycloneII. My experience is that
CycloneII is more powerful than 20KE, although not as powerful as the
Stratix families. But as long as you don't intend to actively use the
DSP blocks, the large RAM's and lots of clocks, CycloneII will do the
job.

Havard

If you are not using the full resources of the APEX device then you
will hopefully fit your design into a EP2C8 (8256 LEs). You should
actually get better fitting with these newer devices due to more
advanced routing. These have embedded multipliers too so if you use
multiplication you'll save a ton of space.

Hamish


htoerrin wrote:
> Eithout knowing anything about your application,...
>
> I believe that if you managed to run things in a 20KE, you will
> definetly be able to run it in a CycloneII. My experience is that
> CycloneII is more powerful than 20KE, although not as powerful as the
> Stratix families. But as long as you don't intend to actively use the
> DSP blocks, the large RAM's and lots of clocks, CycloneII will do the
> job.
>
> Havard