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The three most-heard catchcries in electronic product design are make it smaller, make it more feature rich and make it by next week! The ready availability of lowcost, high-capacity FPGAs presents some interesting design possibilities.
In technology terms, FPGA devices have been around for quite a while. However, to some extent, they have struggled to find their place in mainstream product design. Up until a few years ago, limits on the maximum available gate count saw most FPGAs used as convenient containers for glue logic in designs that were fundamentally built on discrete components. At the other end of the scale, leading-edge FPGA devices are being used as a proving ground for ASIC designs, particularly those designs that integrate processors on the chip so called system-on-chip (SoC) design. FPGAs used in these applications tend to be expensive devices unsuited to production runs.
Soft Hardware
One of the most exciting possibilities with FPGAs is the prospect of being able to update your hardware as easily as you can update the software. More than that, it opens the door to the possibility of field-upgradeable hardware. Many designs, particularly those used in communications applications, operate in an environment where standards and protocols change rapidly. By implementing the design within an FPGA, the core structure of the circuit can be updated without altering the underlying physical hardware. This means that products can be released to market earlier and subsequent hardware revisions made quickly and easily without the need to rework the board or change the fabrication process. Other possibilities include extending the life of existing physical processor-based designs. Take a soft version of a physical processor like an 8051 for example: it can be run inside an FPGA at many times the clock speed of its physical counterpart. This would allow companies to breathe new life into existing product lines without the need for a full redesign or porting thier designs to a more powerful processor architecture.
AR0125 (v2.0) March 03, 2008
Revision History
Date 22-Dec-2003 27-May-2005 30-Nov-2005 03-Mar-2008 Version No. 1.0 1.1 1.2 2.0 Revision New product release Updated for Altium Designer SP4 Template update for Altium Designer 6.0 Updated for Altium Designer Summer 08
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