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Choosing an FPGA can be a complex process because there are so many product families from the different vendors. Product lines and families from the same vendor overlap; product lines and families from different vendors both overlap and, at the same time, sport different features and capabilities; and things are constantly changing, seemingly on a daily basis. Before we start, it’s worth noting that size isn’t everything in the FPGA design world. You really need to base your FPGA selection on your design needs, such as number of I/O pins, available logic resources, availability of special functional blocks, and so forth.
Another consideration is whether you already have dealings with a certain FPGA vendor and product family, or whether you are plunging into an FPGA design for the very first time. If you already have a history with a vendor and are familiar with using its components, tools, and design flows, then you will typically stay within that vendor’s offerings unless there’s an overriding reason for change.
For the purposes of the remainder of these discussions, however, we’ll assume that we are starting from ground zero and have no particular affiliation with any vendor. In this case, choosing the optimum device for a particular design is a daunting task.
Becoming familiar with the architectures, resources, and capabilities associated with the various product families from the different FPGA vendors demands a considerable amount of time and effort. In the real world, time-to market pressures are so intense that design engineers typically have sufficient time to make only high-level evaluations before settling on a particular vendor, family, and device. In this case, the selected FPGA is almost certainly not the optimum component for the design, but this is the way of the world.
Given a choice, it would be wonderful to have access to some sort of FPGA selection wizard application (preferably Web based). This would allow you to choose a particular vendor, a selection of vendors, or make the search open to all vendors. For the purposes of a basic design, the wizard should prompt you to enter estimates for such things as ASIC equivalent gates or FPGA system gates (assuming there are good definitions as to what equivalent gates and system gates are—see also Chapter 2). The wizard should also prompt for details on I/O pin requirements, I/O interface technologies, acceptable packaging options, and so forth.
In the case of a more advanced design, the wizard should prompt you for any specialist options such as gigabit transceivers or embedded functions like multipliers, adders, MACs, RAMs (both distributed and block RAM), and so forth. The wizard should also allow you to specify if you need access to embedded processor cores (hard or soft) along with selections of associated peripherals.
Last but not least, it would be nice if the wizard would prompt you as to any IP requirements (hey, since we’re dreaming, let’s dream on a grand scale). Finally, clicking the “ Go ” button would generate a report detailing the leading contenders and their capabilities (and costs).
Returning to the real world with a sickening thump, we remember that no such utility actually exists at this time, so we have to perform all of these evaluations by hand, but wouldn’t it be nice …
Manufacturer:Xilinx
Product Categories: Varistors
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Manufacturer:Xilinx
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Manufacturer:Xilinx
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Manufacturer:Xilinx
Product Categories: Embedded - CPLDs (Complex Programmable Logic Devices)
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