Is FPGA Field Saturated?

 

Is FPGA Field Saturated? A Point of View

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FPGA stands for field-programmable gate array. FPGA is an integrated circuit that can be programmed by the designer to implement any simple logic function or complex processor on it. Due to its enormous features such as reconfiguration, partial reconfiguration, parallelism, low cost, low turnaround time, it becomes the key component of various fields of embedded, commercial and safety-critical applications.

Steve Casselman proposed the concept of FPGA in the early 1980s. An experiment was created to develop a computing device with 600,000 programmable gates. There are three configuration technologies in which FPGAs are programmed or configured.

1. Static RAM-based configuration technique

2. Flash-based configuration technique

3. Anti-fused based configuration techniques

FPGA architecture consists of three building blocks such as programmable logic blocks, interconnections and I/O blocks. FPGA is programmed using hardware description languages such as VHDL, Verilog HDL and a few others.

Nowadays, FPGAs are used in enormous fields of engineering such as,

• Aerospace, Outer Space, and Defense

• Audio, Automotive, and Broadcast

• Consumer Electronics, Data Centers, and High-Performance Computing

• Instruments of Science, Industrial, and Medical

• Security Applications, Wired & Wireless Communications, and More

The list continues to grow as electronic devices make their way into more aspects of human lives.

Now the question "Is the FPGA field saturated?" The answer is Big NO!!

There are different fields in which engineers are working in this field.

1. The first domain in which we can work is the development of FPGA itself. The CLB on FPGA chips grows from few thousand to the number is in millions now. The latest FPGA from Xilinx is VU19P. The VU19P sets a new standard in FPGAs, featuring 9 million system logic cells, up to 1.5 terabits per second of DDR4 memory bandwidth and up to 4.5 terabits per second of transceiver bandwidth, and over 2,000 user I/Os. It enables the prototyping and emulation of today's most complex SoCs and the development of emerging & complex algorithms used for artificial intelligence, machine learning, video processing and sensor fusion. The VU19P is 1.6 times larger than its predecessor — the 20 nm Virtex UltraScale 440 FPGA.

2. The second domain is the use of FPGA in the prototyping of different ASIC and processors development for various fields discussed above.

3. Third aspects could be testing, verification and dependability analysis of FPGA systems.

Dr Abdul Rafay Khatri

Digital System Design Group.

Department of Electronic Engineering,

QUEST Nawabshah.