The choice of a Spartan 6 is an expensive one - Octopart has it at $64 even in large quantities. That's a lot of FPGA (and I'm assuming they needed it for a large internal RAM).
Comments
Log in with your Bluesky account to leave a comment
The Spartan 6 was a replacement for the original FPGA which suddenly became unobtainium in 2020. It was the closest part to the original they could get in any reasonable quantity with a guaranteed lead time this decade.
As they were a small production run they were at the bottom of the list.
Indeed, but the original choice was no better - big FPGAs with large internal block RAM are inherently expensive. They're a lot easier to design for, sure, but you pay in cost (and being locked into a given design).
Comments
As they were a small production run they were at the bottom of the list.
The design they chose is highly dependent on dual port memory to maintain the timings whilst doing all the extra video stuff though.