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Chuck, have you verified that the price is $15? because i heard it's mostly marketing and the real price is much higher.

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Well it was a quote I got from the distributor. At a conference the guy talking about the chip gave me that price and I asked the distributor to verify it. They squirmed a bit but eventually said they would (also Arrow btw).

That said, there has apparently been a lot more interest in this chip than Xilinx expected and I got the impression they were worried they had under priced it. But some of the markets they are shooting for won't tolerate a higher price so my hope is that it will hold. At 10K units its only a $150K buy to get the 'good' price, one wonders if you could get enough interest in a kickstarter to meet that quantity goal.

I think the real challenge for a kickstarter would be to offer attractive fpga development route. Currently xilinx prices their fpga-c dev tool at around $5K. My guess is that's the real limit , not the price of the zedboard.

Xilinx's official dev boards are all pretty expensive, but they tend to be all-singing all-dancing affairs, with largest-in-class FPGAs, tons of peripherals and interfaces, and enough little blinky lights to blind a goat. Third-party dev boards (like the ones from Digilent: http://digilentinc.com/) tend to be much more reasonable.

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