AMD issued an End of Life (EOL) notice for several older CPLDs and FPGAs on January 1. The notice states that AMD will accept final orders for these devices through June 29, 2024. The affected devices include the XC9500XL, CoolRunner, and CoolRunner II CPLDs, and the Spartan-II and Spartan-3 FPGA families. These products are nearly a quarter of a century old and older. AMD added them to its product portfolio when it acquired Xilinx in 2022. It now appears that the company is cleaning house and discontinuing the older PLDs from the Xilinx acquisition.

When ICs … Read More → "AMD discontinues CoolRunner and XC9500 CPLDs and Spartan-II and -3 FPGAs. Buy ‘em while you can!"

My good friend Adam Taylor recently published a couple of blogs about a new-to-me FPGA vendor named Cologne Chip, a 25-year veteran semiconductor vendor. The company was founded in 1994 as Cologne Chip Designs, and back then, it focused on developing ASICs for the nascent ISDN market. ISDN, or the Integrated Services Digital Network, was the telecom industry’s early effort to develop a digital standard interconnect for telephone systems. Within two years, Cologne Chip Designs had introduced its first ISDN chip. (ISDN standardization took so long that the four-letter abbreviation came to be reinterpreted as “I still … Read More → "Would you buy a $20 GateMate FPGA from Germany’s Cologne Chip?"