Why FPGA Development boards are cheaper than actual FPGA Chip

Hi All,
Why FPGA development boards cost way lesser than the actual price of the FPGA used in that dev board.
See the price on Altera website ($145.72)
https://www.buyaltera.com/PartDetail?partId=4899931
FPGA Development board costs lesser than this ($99)
https://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=English&CategoryNo=167&No=941&PartNo=1

The same FPGA on a PCB with other components at a lower price. I don't quite understand why.


Best Regards,
Anand.

Price varies by quantity, Terasic probably buys 100's of them a month and therefore get a significant price break.

Thank you ads-ee. But I checked bulk pricing of this FPGA on Digikey and other sites; the price seems the same. I couldn't find it cheaper anywhere. Thanks.

A dev board is a nice way to get people to use a company's chips and tools. Probably a loss leader.
A lot of companies will use the dev board to prototype or test their design ideas, which may then translate into 100s or 1000s of sales for Intel/Xilinx.

A dev board is a nice way to get people to use a company's chips and tools.

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Terasic has very nice tools that accompany their kits which can be an atractive for those who are starting in the world of FPGA`s. I would bet that they could be receiving these chips free of charge from the manufacturer, or at a considerable discount.

Eval boards are a "loss leader", an investment in the
"design-in" that leads to sales at some point (or so
the vendor hopes).

anandpv2009 said:

Thank you ads-ee. But I checked bulk pricing of this FPGA on Digikey and other sites; the price seems the same. I couldn't find it cheaper anywhere. Thanks.

Click to expand...

Nope those prices are not the prices preferred customers get. I'm sure Terasic/Digilent/Avnet/etc development board manufactures get their FPGAs at a very steep discount. They also probably buy direct from Altera/intel not through distributor channels like most peons do. Unless you have production runs of 1000's of units a month and/or are a strategic customer don't expect to get much more than the Digikey/Avnet/Arrow quantity discount.

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dick_freebird said:

Eval boards are a "loss leader", an investment in the
"design-in" that leads to sales at some point (or so
the vendor hopes).

Click to expand...

I disagree, Xilinx and Altera's own boards are very expensive and the boards are always more than the cost of the FPGAs. The pricing those internal "customers" get, is likely the price that say a distributor gets, as they are not going to get the parts for free, or at some especially favourable discount. I've worked at places where one group "sells" another group a "product" than goes into their product. We "sold" the module for a profit not a discount. If we sold it for below cost, our group would have lost money and we would have all ended up without jobs in a short time.

As I already stated direct sales and marketing of the vendor can give steep discounts to preferred and strategic customers. Though if you are one of those customers you aren't allowed to divulge what you get the parts for, so don't expect to find out what Terasic buys the Cyclone V part for, but I'd wager it's probably half the price of the board or less.