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When they first arrived on the scene in the mid-1980s, FPGAs were largely used to implement glue logic, medium-complexity state machines, and relatively limited data processing tasks. During the early 1990s, as the size and sophistication of FPGAs started to increase, their big markets at that time were in the telecommunications and networking arenas, both of which involved processing large blocks of data and pushing that data around. Later, toward the end of the 1990s, the use of FPGAs in consumer, automotive, and industrial applications underwent a humongous growth spurt.
FPGAs are often used to prototype ASIC designs or to provide a hardware platform on which to verify the physical implementation of new algorithms. However, their low development cost and short time-to-market mean that they are increasingly finding their way into final products (some of the major FPGA vendors actually have devices they specifically market as competing directly against ASICs).
High-performance FPGAs containing millions of gates are currently available. Some of these devices feature embedded microprocessor cores, highspeed input/output (I/O) devices, and the like. The result is that today’s FPGAs can be used to implement just about anything, including communications devices and software-defined radio; radar, image, and other digital signal processing (DSP) applications; and all the way up to system-on-chip (SoC) components that contain both hardware and software elements.
What are the major market segments for FPGAs?
● ASIC and custom silicon: FPGAs are increasingly being used to implement designs that previously were realized by using only ASICs and custom silicon.
● Digital signal processing: Today’s FPGAs can contain embedded multipliers, dedicated arithmetic routing, and large amounts of on-chip RAM, all of which facilitate DSP operations. When coupled with the massive parallelism provided by FPGAs, this results in outperforming the fastest DSP chips by a factor of 500 or more.
● Embedded microcontrollers: Low-cost microcontrollers, which contain on-chip program and instruction memories, timers and I/O peripherals wrapped around a processor core, are used in small control functions. With falling FPGA prices, however, and increased capability to implement a soft processor core combined with a selection of custom I/O functions, FPGAs are becoming increasingly attractive for embedded control applications.
● Physical layer communications: FPGAs have long been used for the glue logic that interfaces between physical layer communication chips and high-level networking protocol layers. Now high-end FPGAs can contain multiple highspeed transceivers, which means that communications and networking functions can be consolidated into a single device.
● Reconfi gurable computing (RC): FPGAs have created this new market segment. This refers to exploiting the inherent parallelism and reconfi gurability provided by FPGAs to “ hardware accelerate ”software algorithms. Various companies are currently building huge FPGA-based reconfi gurable computing engines for tasks ranging from hardware simulation to cryptography analysis to discovering new drugs.
Manufacturer:Xilinx
Product Categories: CPLDs
Lifecycle:Active Active
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Manufacturer:Xilinx
Product Categories: Memory - Configuration Proms for FPGA's
Lifecycle:Obsolete -
RoHS: No RoHS
Manufacturer:Xilinx
Product Categories: Memory - Configuration Proms for FPGA's
Lifecycle:Obsolete -
RoHS: No RoHS
Manufacturer:Xilinx
Product Categories: CPLDs (Complex Programmable Logic Devices)
Lifecycle:Unconfirmed -
RoHS:
Manufacturer:Xilinx
Product Categories: CPLDs (Complex Programmable Logic Devices)
Lifecycle:Active Active
RoHS:
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