Funny NYPD wrote:
> Industry temp (-40-85C) version FX2lp almost cost doubled its commercial (0-70C) version.

Pretty irrelevant when you're only designing for the Commercial 
temperature range though.

There are a few advantages to the EZ-USB chips as I see it:
   - Firmware is loaded by the host. Load whatever firmware you like,
     if it gets trashed, just reload it. Devices can't be bricked by a
     bad flash upgrade (it's SRAM not FLASH).
   - GPIF module, transferring to RAM buffers or USB. Tell the chip how
     to talk to your FPGA, give it a byte (or word) count, then leave it
     to do the FPGA interfacing while you do something else important.
   - Varying degrees of hardware USB abstraction. Let the hardware do
     everything from enumeration to data transfer for you, or do
     everything yourself (or anything in between).
   - Long time-on-market, well-tested and known stable. The Cypress demo
     driver is apparently pretty shaky, but there's nothing stopping you
     from using libusb-win32 or WinUSB.

The catch(es), of course:
   - You need an external Serial EEPROM to store the VID/PID
   - If the SEEPROM gets corrupted, the VID/PID will probably come up as
     0000:0000, meaning your PC, Mac or whatever won't see the device.
   - No VID/PID sublicensing from Cypress (unlike Mchip)
   - Hardware abstraction limits the possible combinations of endpoint
     count and buffer size. Not really a big deal, though (unless you
     mind having endpoints set up that aren't being used, or
     communicating over EP4 instead of EP0).

-- 
Phil.
piclist@philpem.me.uk
http://www.philpem.me.uk/
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