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I've been told by several people that distributor pricing for FPGAs is ridiculously inflated compared to what direct customers pay, and considering that one can apparently get a dev board on AliExpress for about $110 [1] while Digikey lists the FPGA alone for about $1880 [2], I believe it (this example isn't an UltraScale chip, but it is significantly bigger than the usual low-end Zynq 7000 boards sold to undergrads and tinkerers).

[1] https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256806069467487.html

[2] https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/amd/XC7K325T-1FFG...

mips_r4300i
This is both true and false. While I work with Intel/Altera, Xilinx is basically the same.

That devboard is using recycled chips 100 percent. Their cost is almost nothing.

The kintex-7 part in question can probably be bought in volume quantities for around $190. Think 100kEAU.

This kind of price break comes with volume and is common with many other kinds of silicon besides FPGAs. Some product lines have more pricing pressure than others. For example, very popular MCUs may not get as wide of a price break. Some manufacturers price more fairly to distributors, some allow very large discounts.

bangaladore
I have some first- and second-hand experience with this, and you are correct. I'm not sure who benefits from this practice. It's anywhere from 5-25x cheaper in even small-ish quantities.
oasisaimlessly
What magnitude of a quantity is "small-ish"? How does a business go about becoming a "direct customer" / bypassing the distributors?
0xcde4c3db OP
I'm personally too far from those negotiations to offer any likely-pivotal insight (such as a concrete quantity), but my very rough understanding is that there's some critical volume beyond which a customer basically becomes "made" with the Xilinx/Altera sales channels via a financially significant design win, at which point sales engineers etc. all but have a blank check to do things like comp development boards, advance a tray of whatever device is relevant to the design, etc..

Basically, as George Carlin put it, "it's a big club, and you ain't in it".

bangaladore
Sorry for the late response... I'm new here :)

I don't have exact numbers, but I'm pretty sure you can get significant discounts starting around 100 parts. So not much at all.

Another thing to note is you can already get parts for significant discounts in 1-off quantities through legit Chinese distributors like LCSC. For example, a XC7A35T-2FGG484I is 90$ on Digikey and 20$ at LCSC. I think a personalized deal for that part would be cheaper than 20$ though...

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