CURRENT FEATURE ARTICLES
Pinching Pennies
Low-cost FPGAs target consumer applications
Design Tool Quandary
Which design-tool flow is right for your project?
Beyond Processors
Implementing high-performance DSP algorithms in FPGA
Evaluating Performance
FPGAs vs. DSPs, by Jeff Bier, BDTI
Making the Transition
FPGA Primer for ASIC designers

Does your child own an FPGA? Until fairly recently, the answer to that question would have been a confident “no,” but technology and market dynamics are conspiring to put programmable logic devices in places where we would least expect them. While the ASIC vs. FPGA debate has raged in the domain of low-volume, high-margin systems, things on the consumer product front have remained fairly quiet. There was no reasonable alternative to ASIC for very-high-volume projects such as toys and consumer electronics, due primarily to the enormous unit-cost penalty of programmable logic devices.

The good folks who brew up sophisticated FPGAs for us weren’t content with low-volume, high-production cost applications and prototyping. They saw huge market potential in bringing the joys of field-programmability into the realm of mass-produced systems. If a few nagging problems like unit cost, power, and performance could be solved, they reasoned, design teams could get products to market faster, handle engineering change orders more easily, and take advantage of flexible manufacturing inventory in ways that ASIC implementations could never match.

With ASIC design schedules often pushing a year or more and most FPGAs easily completed in 20 weeks or less, the market-share gains from being first to market with a new product generation can easily outweigh some incremental cost for an FPGA implementation. In fact, for many projects, the anticipated cost-reduction step of moving to ASIC never happens, as incremental feature requirements just roll the product onto another round of programmable-logic. Additionally, the vendors have been hard at work narrowing the incremental cost gap. The newest generations of devices from Altera, Xilinx, Actel, and Lattice specifically target low-cost/high-volume applications and differentiate themselves based on various aspects of performance in that realm.

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