New FPGA Boards coming out?

[dmeads_10]

Hey peeps!! Hope your week is going good!

I really LOVE Digilent's FPGA and SoC boards and have a good handful of them :)

My question is does anyone know when or if Digilent will release new boards? 

I have just been seeing some new parts come around like addtions to the ZYNQ ultrascale+ family and the the new Artix Ultrascale+ which looks aweomse! 

I have just subscribed to the newsletter and searched the blog (should have asked during the AMA) but didn't find anything. I know its probably secret but I just thought I would ask in case anyone has seen anything. 

A follow up question is how long does it take from idea to implementation to shipping of a new board (i know it probably depends on the part but say, for instance, an Arty board or something along those lines).

Thanks!!

-Dom

[JColvin]

Hi @dmeads_10,

Digilent is always working on new products, and subscribing to the newsletter and blog like you did will be the best place to hear about new announcements.

As for the new Xilinx chips, I'm not a product manager, but I personally only heard about these new Xilinx chip architectures yesterday (March 16th) when Xilinx first publicly announced them. If I hear about new Digilent products using these architectures (and am given permission from the Marketing Manager to tell people about them), I'll post back on this thread.

In terms of development time of a new board, that timeline varies quite a bit depending on overall complexity, chosen architecture (of course new architectures will take longer than ones we've already worked with), and of course how many other projects are being worked on at the same time. From my understanding, the Arty A7 (originally Arty) was developed a number of years back when (at least as far I am aware) there were less projects all being worked on in parallel and it had the benefit of using the same chip as the existing Basys 3, so it's development timeline (which I don't really know since I didn't start hearing about it until prototypes were already finished) would be an unfair comparison for these newer and decidedly more complex ICs. I hadn't started working for Digilent yet when the Basys 3 started development, so I'm not sure how long that took.

Thanks,
JColvin