Looking at the recent years of the FPGA business, we have seen that FPGAs are growing bigger and with more and more macro blocks. For each new generation, the silicon process has taken the steps to even more compact silicon. Recently FPGAs manufactured with 40 nm silicon process was announced and the race is still ongoing. The competitors focus their marketing on high-end devices aimed at high-speed serial communication.
Of course, FPGA families targeting smaller embedded applications are provided by the same manufacturer, following the same basic patterns. Large macro blocks and more dense deigns. Some of these are also being equipped with more communication support. These are often seen together with the addition of soft processors.
The soft processor is of course not a bad idea, and almost every FPGA producer does provide a soft processor solution. There are even companies that do business only by providing soft processors and System On Chip (SOC) solutions. Personally I think the SOC concept is very appealing, as it provides the advantages of both software design and programmable logic on the same chip. From an engineering perspective, it is neat to be able to provide a solution based on an optimized balance between software and hardware (as many algorithms successfully are boosted within the hardware domain).
On the other hand, during the race for more dense devices with high speed serial IOs, a new trend has started focusing on small battery powered devices. These are FPGAs that have very good power efficiency and small form factors. This trend has even brought new FPGA manufacturers to the market. These simple FPGAs are going in the totally opposite direction, competing with the smallest amount of power consumption and being cheap. These tend to not focus on any macro blocks and are often FLASH based, removing the need of extra circuits on the board.
Looking at Scandinavia, the market has been controlled by a few silicon producers. Personally I have seen little focus on the new energy optimized devices that are becoming available. These devices are interesting, not only because they are focused on battery applications. As they are cheap (the smallest ones can be bought for a few dollars), they open new markets where FPGAs are considered too expensive, too complex... In time, as these devices become more available, the classical arguments are failing as many designs can benefit from the new small FPGAs. Can it be that an expensive DSP can be replaced by a microcontroller and an FPGA implementing complex protocol and accelerating computations? – At least in some applications. On other cases, a microcontroller may be completely replaced by a small FPGA due to a simple task that the FPGA could do better. Although the focus has been battery held application, I like to think of the less obvious applications that can benefit from this trend.
So what does it mean for us in our daily life? Nothing if we choose not to care and proceed in the direction we have been walking for the last years. Or if we choose to stop and look around for a moment, we will see that there are many new interesting opportunities. I feel that if we don’t do this, we will not be able to produce as good and cost effective deigns as we should. My aim with this article is to call attention to some ongoing trends in the world of programmable logic.
In this column the world of FPGAs, DSPs, ASICs, Processors and Processes, will be further explored. We will look into subjects related to technical development and the embedded market. I hope you will enjoy the journey into the hidden lands of technology and embedded systems. Stay tuned.
Mattias Almljung, Altran Technologies Sweden
Sources:
Serial Soirée
Altera Tempts with Tons of Transceivers,
Kevin Morris, FPGA and Structured ASIC Journal
February 10, 2009
http://www.siliconbluetech.com/
http://www.actel.com/
http://www.altera.com/
http://www.xilinx.com/