Aw, bummer. It looks like makers and hobbyists are not buying enough Lattice FPGAs. Lattice is announcing layoffs:
They have no one to blame but themselves - asking for a chip with almost four times less LUTs (maximum 7680) for a price more than ten times more than the Chinese Tangnano25k board, which also holds 25000 LUTs (more than three times ).
@yrabbit You're right about the boards. I haven't tried to price their parts in any sort of volume, but if there is a similar price difference, then yikes!
@yrabbit I dug up an old invoice. Back in 2015 I was able to get that icestick board for $21.86. Hmm...
@cstanhope
Of course it is possible to conduct research in large volumes, but from the times of the institute I remember that a random sample is usually indicative. I tried again and the result is even worse: 138000 LUTs vs 5300 LUTs.
I should note that the number of LUTs is such a clear indicator, but also the other board components are not in favour of Lattice - the oldest Tangnano models (even those that are no longer in production) run at a minimum of 27MHz
@cstanhope
(and have this quartz on the board), Tangmega 138k at a minimum of 50MHz. The iCE40 is 12MHz.
The fact that you were able to buy an iCE40 in 2015 at a reasonable price (although it depends on how you look at it - you see I don't quote prices for boards of similar power:) ) tells me that their irresponsible and unwise pricing policy in the following years led to the current state of affairs.
Not ‘they’, but yes the fully open source toolkit is there - https://github.com/YosysHQ/apicula
Also Gowin itself has a ‘student’ version designed to support 3 types (or families, I can't remember) of FPGAs and in addition the fully licensed version requires only registration on the website.
Project Apicula 🐝: bitstream documentation for Gowin…
GitHub