Top 5 benefits of FPGA technology

Field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology continues to gain momentum, and the worldwide FPGA market is expected to grow from $1.9 billion in 2005 to $2.75 billion by 2010. Since its invention by Xilinx in 1984, FPGAs have gone from being simple glue logic chips to actually replacing custom application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and processors for signal processing and control applications. Why has this technology been so successful? This article provides an introduction to FPGAs and highlights some of the benefits that make FPGAs unique.

Top Five Benefits:

1. Performance
2. Time to Market
3. Cost
4. Reliability
5. Long-Term Maintenance

At the highest level, FPGAs are reprogrammable silicon chips. Using prebuilt logic blocks and programmable routing resources, you can configure these chips to implement custom hardware functionality without ever having to pick up a breadboard or soldering iron. You develop digital computing tasks in software and compile them down to a configuration file or bitstream that contains information on how the components should be wired together. In addition, FPGAs are completely reconfigurable and instantly take on a brand new “personality” when you recompile a different configuration of circuitry. In the past, FPGA technology was only available to engineers with a deep understanding of digital hardware design. The rise of high-level design tools, however, is changing the rules of FPGA programming, with new technologies that convert graphical block diagrams or even C code into digital hardware circuitry.

FPGA chip adoption across all industries is driven by the fact that FPGAs combine the best parts of ASICs and processor-based systems. FPGAs provide hardware-timed speed and reliability, but they do not require high volumes to justify the large upfront expense of custom ASIC design. Reprogrammable silicon also has the same flexibility of software running on a processor-based system, but it is not limited by the number of processing cores available. Unlike processors, FPGAs are truly parallel in nature so different processing operations do not have to compete for the same resources. Each independent processing task is assigned to a dedicated section of the chip, and can function autonomously without any influence from other logic blocks. As a result, the performance of one part of the application is not affected when additional processing is added.

The adoption of FPGA technology continues to increase as higher-level tools evolve to deliver the benefits of reprogrammable silicon to engineers and scientists of all expertise.