Analysis FPGA
Jesus Eduardo Ocaa Martinez
Department of Electrical and
Electronic Engineering
Technological Institute of Mrida
Merida, Mexico
Eduardo306_94@hotmail.com
FPGA
A Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is a
programmable device that contains logic
blocks with interconnection and functionality
can be configured on the spot using a
specialized description language.
Programmable logic can reproduce from
functions as simple as those carried out by a
logic gate or a combined system to complex
systems on a chip.
Manufacturers
In early 2007, the FPGA market has been put
in a state where there are two large general
purpose FPGA producers and a set of other
competitors offering devices with specific
characteristics.
Some manufacturers have FPGAs that can
only be programmed once, so their advantages
and disadvantages are halfway between ASICs
and reprogrammable FPGAs.
Xilinx is one of the great leaders in FPGA
design.
Altera is the other big giant. Announced an
agreement with Intel in 2015 to develop a
supercomputing platform with integrated
FPGA CPUs.
Lattice Semiconductor released 90nm FPGA
technology. It is the leader in non-flying
technology as FPGA based on Flash
technology and with 90nm and 130nm
products. In 2014, Lattice Semiconductor
began offering programmable devices based
on RAM combined with non-reprogrammable
non-volatile memory.
Actel (now Microsemi) has FPGAs based on
reprogrammable Flash technology.
QuickLogic has one-time programmable
antifuse based products.
Atmel is one of the manufacturers that
produce reconfigurable devices. It focused on
AVR microcontrollers with FPGA together in
the same package.
Achronix Semiconductor develops very fast
FPGAs.
MathStar Inc. offers FPGAs that they call
FPOA (Field Programmable Object Arrays).
Trends
Aerospace and Defense: Xilinx atiende a la
industria aeroespacial y de defensa con
soluciones de nivel de sistema comerciales, de
defensa y espaciales que abarcan los dispositivos
FPGA y SoC lderes de la industria, soluciones
IP avanzadas y la prxima generacin de todas
las herramientas de diseo programables.
Audio: Xilinx FPGAs are unrivalled in providing
the digital signal processing (DSP) performance
required in audio processing, interfacing,
compression, embedding and conversion. The
inherent parallelism of FPGA architectures
means that many channels of audio can be
processed together in very efficient resources.
The high performance of Xilinx FPGAs means
that audio performance and quality is excellent
and well in excess of most applications needs.
Market analysis
FPGAs are replacing many Integrated Circuits
for Specific Applications (ASIC) designs. FPGAs
offer a similar cost per unit and density as ASIC
technology, but with the added advantage of
reducing non-recurring costs and greater
flexibility. In addition, current and future
hybrids between FPGA and CPU are making
FPGAs an increasingly attractive alternative not
only for ASICs but also for embedded processors
and DSPs. Currently, FPGA vendors can offer
increased capacity and performance at low cost
and power consumption, but there is a strong
demand to move forward to bridge the gap with
ASICs and ASSPs.