CURRENT FEATURE ARTICLES

Embedded Dilemma
Platforms, soft-cores, RTOS, oh my!
Bringing the Processor into the FPGA
by Rob Irwin, Altium Limited
Language Barrier
How will the next generation of FPGAs be designed?
What's the Right Language for DSP System-Level Design?
by Tom Feist, VP of Marketing, AccelChip, Inc.
Board with FPGAs
Challenges getting your FPGA to work - on your board
Getting Physical
New physical design tools target FPGA
Corralling the Complexity of FPGAs
by Jackson Kreiter, of Hier Design, Inc.
Glue to Glory
How three innovations are changing the face of FPGA design

All I really need to know about designing embedded systems on FPGAs I learned in kindergarten. Well, maybe not exactly kindergarten, but close. It was in 1983 in the undergraduate EE lab at the University of Texas. I had a Motorola 6809 development board (complete with hex keypad and LED display), my prototyping board (a mass of mostly SSI components wire-wrapped), a logic analyzer, and a scope. I was partitioning my application into hardware and software components, developing firmware, testing hardware/software interfaces, and debugging my system piece by piece. It worked.

About fifteen years later, I heard that FPGA vendors were planning to put processor cores on FPGAs. The speculation started almost immediately: “This means that FPGA designers will now have to adopt the design approach of SOC ASIC! They’ll need to do system-level partitioning, hardware-software co-design and co-verification, and sophisticated HDL design with multi-language IP re-use. Then, they’ll have to find some magic way to boost designer IQ by twenty points or so…” In corporate strategy rooms, visions of multitudes of FPGA designers standing in line to buy tools with six-digit price-tags painted broad, hopeful smiles on the faces of EDA executives.

Back in my college lab, however, I didn’t feel particularly sophisticated. I didn’t have a multi-disciplinary design team or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of state-of-the-art virtual prototyping tools. I didn’t even have a college degree, yet I built a working system with all of the elements of today’s typical field programmable system-on-chip design. [more]

Until recently, high-capacity programmable devices have largely served two roles – they have either been used as a reconfigurable platform for prototyping complex logic or they have provided a delivery vehicle for custom logic in vertical applications where high device costs could be absorbed in the product price. Now, a dramatic, downward shift in FPGA prices is promising to expand these applications to include a wide array of industrial and consumer products. Holding to Moore’s law, FPGAs have delivered dramatic increases in capacity while continuing to decrease in cost, to the point where FPGAs now offer a million gate design platform capable of implementing an entire embedded system, including the processor and peripheral components, for costs measured not in hundreds, but in tens of dollars. [more]