Thursday, January 18th 2024
AMD Discontinues Selection of Old Xilinx CPLD & FPGA Models
AMD has quietly issued a product discontinuation notice—their PDF document is dated January 1 2024—for a whole bunch of Xilinx Complex Programmable Logic Device (CLPD) and lower-end FPGA models. Team Red's opening statement on the matter reads: "AMD will be discontinuing XC9500XL, CoolRunner XPLA 3, CoolRunner II, Spartan II, and Spartan 3, 3A, 3AN, 3E, 3ADSP Commercial/ Industrial "XC" and Automotive "XA" Product Families due to declining run-rate and supplier sustainability reasons." The American multinational semiconductor inherited a large back catalog of programmable logic products once their acquisition of Xilinx was completed back in 2022.
Industry analysts believed that this takeover was mainly motivated by a desire to expand into FPGA territories, although Team Red indicated that it would carry on producing and supporting Xilinx's older CLPD products—for example, the Spartan 3 family debuted back in 2011, while a couple of the CoolRunner II parts on the list are of 2002 vintage. AMD's discontinuation notice provides details of Last Time Buy (LTB) final orders—the cut-off date for soon-to-be-axed devices appears to be June 29 2024.
Sources:
AMD Discontinuation Document, Tom's Hardware, EE News Europe
Industry analysts believed that this takeover was mainly motivated by a desire to expand into FPGA territories, although Team Red indicated that it would carry on producing and supporting Xilinx's older CLPD products—for example, the Spartan 3 family debuted back in 2011, while a couple of the CoolRunner II parts on the list are of 2002 vintage. AMD's discontinuation notice provides details of Last Time Buy (LTB) final orders—the cut-off date for soon-to-be-axed devices appears to be June 29 2024.
5 Comments on AMD Discontinues Selection of Old Xilinx CPLD & FPGA Models
Spartan 3 is old... really, really, really old.
Go get yourself a modern Spartan 7: www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/digilent-inc/410-376/9445911
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Though most people probably want the Zynq these days: www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/digilent-inc/410-370/9445909 . FPGA + ARM combo-chip just makes more sense in more cases. (No "softcore" is anywhere near as good as a hardcore ARM... and yes that's the proper terminology here and I'm not just making shit up...)
Zynq are SoC with a very "bad" segmentation strategy and adds complexity when no needed, you only have to take a look at the ones inside dpsaces.