6 May
2010
6 May
'10
9:54 p.m.
On Thu, May 06, 2010 at 10:46:33AM -0700, Niels Mayer wrote:
Certainly the firmware development time is costly, but
it's also already
been spent and other than ongoing maintenance, a cost that has most likely
already been recouped as well. The real question is are they continuing to
put FPGA's in their new "prosumer" oriented products, such as
http://www.rme-audio.de/download/sheets/babyface_e.pdf (nb: the term "FPGA"
is used 0 times in this document).
If RME is not using a FPGA in the babyface, then they are probably using
a 3rd party chipset.
http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/moelbryn/raggedstone1.html
indicates the
starting point for just the spartan 3, and support chips is already above
what most "prosumer" cards cost -- $100.00. Unlike custom VLSI, you can't
just plop a FPGA on the pci bus. Note that the Xilinx isn't the only chip on
this card: http://www.soundworks.dk/images/rme/hdsp9632_big.jpg -- there's
at least 6 other chips in the "digital" part of the card, some of
high-complexity/integration/cost based on their pincount -- in addition to
the Xilinx chip. That includes an additional Xilinx chip (flash memory??)
that is clearly visible on the above pictured board.
I don't know where they establish their prices from.
If you look on Digikey, you will see that you can get some quite capable
FPGAs for $15-20. FPGAs that can easily handle a 72x72 matrix AND a PCI
bus (directly connected to PCI), and some amount of hardware mixing.
Spartan3s can use a standard SPI PROM for configuration (a big
improvement over the Spartan IIs), which probably costs about $3ish.
You also likely need an oscillator, which might be about another $4.
And these prices are for single unit quantities. If you order $1000 at
once, you will start to see the price be lower still.
Keep in mind, what might really drive up the size of the required FPGA
would be the 8192 point mixer, which is something that no prosumer card
does.
A lot of cards with CME and Via VLSI chips also use normal off the shelf
ADCs, DACs, and/or digital audio recievers and transmitters, so clearly
these aren't the sole determiner of cost.
Now, I've never seen the insides of a device with a large number of
channels of IO that didn't use an off the shelf FPGA or DSP, so perhaps
some higher end products from Apogee or Avid do put everything into one
ASIC.
Some business people will give a back-of-the-envelope
calculation that a
$20.00 increase in parts cost translates to a $100.00 increase in consumer
cost. And the above estimated $100 parts cost of an RME's fpga and support
chips translates to a card that costs $500.00 more e.g.
http://www.amazon.com/RME-Hammerfall-9652-Audio-Interface/dp/B0002H030S/
RME can and will continue to do what it does very well -- and priced at "you
get what you pay for rates."
I would venture to say that 5:1 might be a reasonable profit margin for
a company RME's size. I know that is what a previous employer who made
(among other things) multi-channel digital audio products aimed for.
Just seems that since they've got the entire thing
already programmed out in
an FPGA, they could build a VLSI at little incremental cost. It's not like
they're starting from scratch... And given the look of the "BabyFace"
perhaps some of their new products will indicate a shift towards this
strategy (?).
Sorry, but switching to a VLSI is probably a very large incremental
cost. While the company I worked for was too small to make VLSIs, the
rule of thumb I heard was a minimum order in the millions of dollars
(usualy figure I see in EDN is something like $2 million). Going from
HDL to chip masks is apparently not entirely automated, and once the
masks are designed, actually making them and setting up a production
line is extremely expensive. After that, each chip made is very cheap.
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I've always seen
FPGA as something to use for
one-off or very low-volume projects. For example
http://www.fpgaarcade.com/ :-) But I have no idea of how many cards RME
sells a year. Actually, that would be a very interesting number, just to get
an idea of the order-of-magnitude size of the "pro" end of the DAW market..
Sure, but very low volume is probably anything under a quarter of a
million units.
Just for the heck of it, does anyone have any idea how many Protools
Digi units are sold in a year?