FPGAs and Moore's Law

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.