CURRENT FEATURE ARTICLES

BOM Blast
Cutting Costs with FPGAs
Duct Tape, FPGAs, and the Art of Making Great Multi-Purpose Tools
by Darren Zacher, Mentor Graphics Corporation
Teaching them to Fish
Xilinx Expands Services
Dialing-in DSP on FPGA
Catapult Customized for Altera
Myth of the Technical Track
Management Migration of Engineering Talent
Happy Birthday!
FPGA Journal Turns 4
Pumping Up Precision
Mentor Upgrades Synthesis
Low Power Processing
Actel Igloo Meets ARM Cortex M1

JOURNAL WEBCASTS

BOM Blast
Cutting Costs with FPGAs

The age of big, expensive, power-hungry FPGAs is now officially over.  Of course, FPGA companies still make devices with three (and even four) digit price tags.  The biggest, baddest chips will probably be at that price point for awhile.  But don’t be deceived.  There’s a revolution afoot, and it isn’t at the high end.  The capabilities of low-cost FPGAs are where the real action is today.

There’s nothing new about low-cost FPGAs either, of course.  They’ve been around for close to a decade now, and the CPLDs that the earliest ones most closely resembled have been around even longer.  Those devices were just teasers, however.  The real revolution has been in the years that followed.  Low-cost FPGAs have gradually made their way up the density and capability curve and have finally developed some characteristics of their own that even high-end FPGAs can’t match.

The stakes in low-cost FPGAs are high because those cost-sensitive applications tend to be very high volume.  If you’re in the business of selling silicon, volume is the key.  Park one of your chips in a successful consumer or automotive application and you can watch the revenues roll in for years.  As a result, every FPGA company has attacked the emerging high-volume/low-cost segment with a vengeance.  This competition has had some interesting effects, bringing some significant capability down into the low-cost realm that might have otherwise taken years to migrate. [more]

Duct Tape, FPGAs, and the Art of Making Great Multi-Purpose Tools
by Darren Zacher, Mentor Graphics Corporation

Most engineers will agree that duct tape is an excellent multi-purpose tool.  This wonder product has been used for everything from giving tennis balls the feel of a cricket ball, to saving the Apollo 13 mission from certain disaster.  Engineers love good multi-purpose tools because of the sheer versatility that they offer; a good multi-purpose tool can help a creative engineer get themselves out of a real bind.

To hardware designers, FPGAs are also excellent multi-purpose tools.  No other “off-the-shelf” semiconductor can become so many different things to different people.  The super-versatile logic cell architecture of the typical FPGA allows it to be used for everything from image enhancement on the Mars rover, to a life-saving patient heart monitor.  But FPGAs have been changing. [more]