FROM
THE EDITOR
This week, we look at the new announcement of an Altera Cyclone III development kit with the ARM Cortex M1 soft-core processor. This could be big news for the future of FPGA-based embedded computing systems. What’s the big deal? Our latest feature has the details.
We also have a contributed article titled “A New Way to Design FPGAs” from Simon Bloch, General Manager of the Design and Synthesis Division at Mentor Graphics. Simon points out that third-party tools for FPGA design are rapidly evolving, and that simply taking the default, vendor-dependent tools without carefully looking at the options can be a costly mistake for many design teams.
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Kevin Morris – Editor
FPGA and Structured ASIC Journal
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ARM and Altera
Why You Should Care
The ARM Cortex M1 is out to conquer the world.
Stealthily.
Cleverly.
Kindly.
It will probably be one of those rare conquests where the conquered smile and rejoice and say “Thank you! Thank you for conquering us!”
Electronic designers will flood the streets in celebration, now having access to exactly what they have needed all along. Even those who weren’t aware that they needed anything different will be excited and appreciative. The earth will simply be a better place.
OK, maybe it’s not as big as all that.
To understand why we should care about this week’s announcement that Arrow will be distributing development kits enabling ARM’s FPGA-optimized Cortex M1 processors on Altera’s Cyclone III FPGAs, we need to revisit some of the history of FPGAs as systems-on-chip (SoC).
It is only fairly recently in FPGA history that FPGAs had the horsepower to make viable system-on-chip platforms. Before sometime around the 130nm process node, there just weren’t enough equivalent gates or performance to do much useful embedded processing work on an FPGA and have room left for – you know, FPGA stuff. Once we got the performance and capacity to put a processor (or four) down, we had to look at the question of real engineering tradeoffs – why should the processor (soft or hard core) be on the FPGA instead of sitting right next to it? [more]
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A New Way to Design FPGAs
by Simon Bloch, Mentor Graphics Corp.
FPGAs have proven to be a viable solution for a broad range of applications, from early beginnings in telecommunications, to the highly complex computing systems of today. In fact, the FPGA industry is seeing more complex designs than ever before—with the demand for larger and faster FPGAs to create innovative end-products. With the sheer number of FPGA resources, the availability of more sophisticated EDA tools and the SystemVerilog language, new process flows for ESL design, and the strengths or limitations of the design team, FPGA designers are faced with lots of choices when developing their new technologies. The customer must often negotiate getting the best unit cost from the FPGA vendor, since price sensitivity is crucial in many markets. In addition, the importance of getting these products out the door on-time, within tighter budget and resource constraints, has become even more challenging in the highly competitive FPGA based system markets. [more]
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