alt Hacker NewsWe've had good experiences with Lattice parts. Their software tools are free for all of their basic chips. They only charge for licensing when you use the higher end SKUs with SerDes. Example, you can use and develop on an ECP5 or Certus using their free license, but then you need a paid license to work on ECP5-5G or CertusPro chips.
They're not perfect, but they're better to work with than Xilinx. Also, their datasheetd are better than Xilinx in my experience.
Give Lattice a look for your next project.
Replies
> Give Lattice a look for your next project.
Sometime after the heat death of the universe, maybe. IME raising prices during development is their modus operandi.
I came in here to recommend Lattice as well, at least for small glue-logic type applications. I've used their various MaxhXO lines extensively and really enjoy working with them.
Eh... unfortunately they shut down their forums a couple of years ago. So good luck getting any form of support as a free user even if you run into real bugs in their software (believe me, I tried...)
That being said, I have used their ice40 and ECP5 FPGAs with Yosys for a couple of small projects and that worked perfectly fine.
FWIW I'm using Yosis for my Ice40 Lattice FPGA purely because their Linux support is bad.
Getting a free hobby license requires emailing them with MAC addresses (which means I have to do that for my desktop, laptop, and again for any future machine I may get). Then getting the tools to actually run on Linux seemed to be impossible that I just gave up.
It's not clear that I have the Yosys and open source options for my Xilinx based fpgas.