Another season comes to an end, and The Gate Array News is here. This is the second edition of this series os articles, and I think that it would be a very interesting exercise to recover the news of the last TGA News.

In 2023 we talked about the announcement of Spartan 7 Ultrascale+. I thought that there wasn’t a real need for these devices when we already had the Artix 7 Ultrascale+, but after talking with some AMD guys, I realize that it is not a just market need, but also a need to standardize the fabrication process to 16nm, and let behind the 28nm, which I think makes a lot of sense.

Another topic that we talked about was the (almost hidden) announcement of PolarFire 2 FPGA. The truth is that one year later, we have no more information besides a new faster architecture. In the FPGA Conference I had the opportunity to talk with Microchip and the PolarFire 2 project is ongoing, and maybe it will come with some new interesting features. These new features could be very interesting for industrial customers, a field that Microchip wants to fill, but this is not confirmed so, we have to wait some time.

Also, in 2023 we talked about the announcement of Sipeed Tang Mega 138k. The kit was released this year and it is very interesting. I have the plan to buy one and write some articles using it but there is an issue with the license. The license needed for the Gowin IDE to use this part need a license. Sipeed shares its floating license but I don’t know if this will be forever, or just for some time, in any case, it is an interesting board to test.

Regarding this year, we have some new boards with Artix Ultrascale+, the AUBoard 15P FPGA Development Kit from AVNET, and the AXAU15 FPGA Dev Board from ALINX. The cost for the ALINX board is less than 600$ while AVNET hasn’t announced the cost for now, but it must be less than 600$.

Shocking news from 2024 was the return of Altera. After the separation of Intel from the Intel FPGA division, now they have changed the name of that FPGA division to a very familiar name, Altera. I don’t know how exactly this change affect the customers. The reality is that this year Altera has released the Agilex family with different flavours, Agilex 5 and Agilex 7. In the future, these two families will be extended with Agilex 3 and Agilex 9… is this numeration familiar to you? yes, they used the same numbers as for the processor family.

Regarding controlpaths, for the new season, I have prepared some articles with Speedgoat and Microchip, but this new season also I will be involved in two different projects. The first of them has been mentioned in some articles, it is OHSim (Open Hardware Simulator). A set of power electronics models implemented in Verilog that can be run in any FPGA or SoC. In addition to the model, I am also working in a set of peripheral IPs to make the integration of these models easy. The information on the project is on its official webpage. The project will also have some boards designed to integrate all the needed to run models easily. More information will be available soon.

In addition to this project, I am also involved in The Hackbat project. This project is intended to design hardware for hacking. This project comes from a talk I gave at a cybersecurity conference where I presented a talk demystifying the Flipper Zero. To do that I designed a device with pretty similar hardware capabilities and open source. This device’s name is Hackbat. Since this project was very well accepted by the community, I am working on a new device, now under the brand The Hackbat. The new board will be released soon, also open-source and all the files will be available for everyone.

Now it’s time for vacations. I will be here on September 7th!