FPGAs and Moores Law - CIOL News Reports

FPGAs

Most Commented

Unified Communication for your Biz

Improve your contact center performance. See how you can make a difference.

Watch Now

Reach the ICT Community

Engage and build your ICT audience with CIOL online advertising.

Know more

FPGAs and Moore's Law

Field programmable gate arrays or FPGAs have become faster, denser and more complex over the years!

Pradeep Chakraborty

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Email This

Print This

Comments

RSS

BANGALORE, INDIA: Without a doubt, FPGAs have adopted Moore's Law more closely than any other device technology! They even 'help' in 'ratifying' new process nodes!

Field programmable gate arrays or FPGAs have become faster, denser and more complex over the years! Once relegated to simple glue logic design, FPGAs are challenging SoCs today. The million-gate FPGAs are, in fact, quite common. What's more, ASSP like features, for example, PCI Express, USB, etc., have also found their way into FPGAs.

Speaking at the recently held Altera SOPC conference, S. Janakiraman, President and CEO-R&D Services, MindTree, and former chairman, India Semiconductor Association (ISA), said these had found acceptance in a wide range of market segments. "FPGAs are everywhere, be it telecom or industrial or medical," he added.

Janakiraman said: "With the ever increasing costs of designs and declining ASIC starts, FPGAs offer a considerably less riskier approach, development costs, tools and testing, even at latest technology nodes."

Factors driving change
These are multiple, and actually split into cost, performance, time-to-market and also field-upgradeable hardware.

From the cost aspect, functions in a system with standard ICs are performed by dedicated discrete components on a PCB. The FPGA route can reduce routing congestion and lower costs by enabling the use of smaller boards with less layers and lower component count.

Next comes performance, and a key factor in accelerating performance is parallel implementation. Here too, the FPGA can be easily programmed to handle the same sequential instruction set by leveraging multiple micro-CPUs, connected by very wide internal buses.

Time-to-market has obviously become critical with the consumerization of electronics. As a result, the FPGAs are increasingly entering this segment because of the obvious advantages of early product introductions.

As for the field upgradeable hardware, Janakiraman highlighted an example: configuring video capture card for Europe (PAL), NA (NTSC), JAPAN (SECAM), needs one hardware configuration with an FPGA on it. Depending on the location end-user downloads country specific driver that configures FPGA accordingly.

©CIOL Bureau

Would you like to on this article?

Be first to comment on this article

Name
Email
Your reply

Windows 7: Should CIOs migrate?

China wooing Indian IT companies

Arrested NASA scientist worked on Chandrayaan-1

Yahoo triples profit, beats expectations

Polaris eyes emerging mkt post LaserSoft takeover

TSMC, Infineon extend partnership

TMIC pact with Elpida Memory stays

Elpida to outsource chips to Taiwan's ProMOS

SmartGuard aims Rs 100 cr revenue in 3 yrs

Nikon, Elpida still waiting on tech recovery

	Simplify Business Management. ERP solutions by IBM
	Carry your Dream, Convey your Value with ZTE
	Get EMC Efficient.Learn more

	Get expert views on Mobilin V2
	How to make your enterprise productive
	Unified Communication can impact business. Know how

	Making Web3.0 a Reality!
	CIOL Enterprise Next :What's NEXT in IT? :
	Decrease Total System Costs With Cyclone IV FPGAs

	Reach your desired Target Audience and realize high ROI
	Effective ways of Customer Acquisition through Demand Generation
	Reach 2,500 potential Enterprise Customers!