The History, Status, and Future of FPGAs
ASIC teams always fight the FPGA concept. ASIC designers ask, “Which functionality do you want?” and are impatient if the answer is, “I don’t know yet.”
The History, Status, and Future of FPGAs Read MoreAn FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) is a chip that is programmed by a circuit. It is said to “emulate” that circuit. This emulation runs slower than the actual circuit would run if it were implemented in an ASIC—it has a slower clock frequency and uses more power, but it can be reprogrammed every few hundred milliseconds.
—CACM, “The History, Status, and Future of FPGAs”
A Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is an integrated circuit designed to be configured by a customer or a designer after manufacturing – hence the term field-programmable. The FPGA configuration is generally specified using a hardware description language (HDL), similar to that used for an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). Circuit diagrams were previously used to specify the configuration, but this is increasingly rare due to the advent of electronic design automation tools.
FPGAs contain an array of programmable logic blocks, and a hierarchy of reconfigurable interconnects allowing blocks to be wired together. Logic blocks can be configured to perform complex combinational functions, or act as simple logic gates like AND and XOR. In most FPGAs, logic blocks also include memory elements, which may be simple flip-flops or more complete blocks of memory. Many FPGAs can be reprogrammed to implement different logic functions, allowing flexible reconfigurable computing as performed in computer software.
FPGAs have a remarkable role in embedded system development due to their capability to start system software (SW) development simultaneously with hardware (HW), enable system performance simulations at a very early phase of the development, and allow various system partitioning (SW and HW) trials and iterations before final freezing of the system architecture.
—Wikipedia, “Field-programmable gate array“
ASIC teams always fight the FPGA concept. ASIC designers ask, “Which functionality do you want?” and are impatient if the answer is, “I don’t know yet.”
The History, Status, and Future of FPGAs Read More