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Having considered the future from the viewpoint of certain key application areas, let’s cross-reference those predictions by taking a look at the trends in semiconductor development and production.
In chapter one we outlined the various semiconductor trends that have impacted SoC and other chip design up until now. We saw how these trends have increased the need for prototyping up until the present time. In this section we will complete that task and try to predict how those trends will continue over the next five years and what effect this will have on prototyping.
• Miniaturization: there is no clear end in sight to the miniaturization of silicon to achieve smaller silicon technology nodes. As a result, the complexity of the projects at the leading-edge technology nodes will be so complex that it is simply too risky to tape out without prototyping early and often. FPGA-based prototyping will support increased complexity as FPGA devices get larger, benefiting, and to some extent, driving those technology trends.
• Embedded CPUs: as the latest generations of FPGAs have family members which include embedded processors, it will be interesting to see if they will be used to run the embedded software in the system, rather than use a test chip of the CPU core(s) which the FPGA is prototyping. Perhaps the choice of CPU in the SoC might even be driven by its availability or otherwise in an FPGA format for prototyping.
• Decrease in overall design starts: this trend is widely expected to continue as the SoC production costs will make smaller technology nodes less accessible and will likely cause further consolidation in the semiconductor industry. With less design starts the remaining designs need to address more designs in order to re-coup the investment through more end applications. Virtual and FPGA-based prototyping will become even more necessary in order to mitigate risk of potential re-spins.
• Programmability: in the mobile wireless and consumer application domains the desire to de-couple software development from hardware dependencies will further increase. Virtual prototyping will also gain in importance as it allows software development to commence even earlier. SDKs will contain greater capabilities for software verification previously only accessible to host development.
• IP reuse: IP usage continues to increase, which is an easy prediction to make. The semiconductor analyst Gartner confirmed its most recent predictions that the amount of IP reuse will again double between 2010 and 2014. In addition, the trend to licensing complete sub-systems will grow and open a new area of prototyping for complete sub-systems containing an assembly of pre-defined hardware and software IP.
• Multicore processing: Adoption of multicore architectures will cause more pressure on analyzing and optimizing software parallelization. Today parallelization has been solved in specific application domains, such as graphics, but it is likely that different application-specific solutions will be required in other areas, such as networking and automotive electronics.
• Low power: today’s methods for reducing power in semiconductors are focused on implementation and silicon-level engineering. Future requirements will be better addressed by moving the focus of low-power design to the architectural design level. As a result virtual and FPGA-based prototypes will be instrumented to allow low-power analysis for early feedback on some aspects of the power design. For example, for activity capture and average dissipation over certain software functions.
• AMS design: an increase in the analog/mixed signal portion of chips will create even more demand to allow in-system validation. Virtual IO for virtual platforms and interfaces of FPGA-based prototypes to its environment will become more critical.
Manufacturer:Xilinx
Product Categories: Industrial components
Lifecycle:Active Active
RoHS:
Manufacturer:Xilinx
Product Categories: FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Array)
Lifecycle:Obsolete -
RoHS: No RoHS
Manufacturer:Xilinx
Product Categories: FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Array)
Lifecycle:Obsolete -
RoHS: No RoHS
Manufacturer:Xilinx
Product Categories: FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Array)
Lifecycle:Obsolete -
RoHS: No RoHS
Manufacturer:Xilinx
Product Categories: FPGAs
Lifecycle:Obsolete -
RoHS:
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