Traditionally, FPGAs have been used for specific applications where the volume of production is small and the cost of the FPGA based product for end buyers can withstand the combined costs of the FPGA silicon and associated design services and IP cores.
Today, new low-cost AMD FPGAs and a big choice of free AMD IP cores have increased a number of applications that may prefer FPGA over the ASSP or ASIC. Still, prices of the third-party IP cores may be challenging even for the well-funded design teams.
The table bellow presents a simple cost analysis and comparison between an industry standard Pay Once license fee (Project or Site license) and the Xylon
Low-Volume IP license fee.
The table shows a big difference between IP cost/unit ratios achievable with these two different licensing models.
The Pay Once model's 5 € IP cost/unit for a single IP core can be noncompetitive to ASSP solutions, and may be a decisive reason for adoption of non-FPGA system architectures.
At the same time, the Xylon Low-Volume licensing model enables great savings and provides up to 10x better IP cost/unit ratios. Xylon customers can get full-featured
logicBRICKS IP cores at a price lower than a cost of a single engineer/week in-house development time.
| Pay Once License
| Xylon Low-Volume License
|
License Fee*1
| 10,000 €
| 1,000 €
|
Number of Units
| 2,000
| 2,000
|
IP Cost/Unit
| 5 € / unit
| 0.5 € / unit
|
*1 - €10,000 price taken as a typical example price of the market third-party IP cores.
For more details check the application note:
"Xylon Low-Volume IP Program"