Specific apps for FPGAs
20 July 2009
The rise of the FPGA seems certain to continue as the suppliers make this most flexible of technologies accessible to more users and for more applications.
I spoke last week to Giles Peckham of Xilinx as part of his company’s press tour to launch the availability of its latest Spartan and Virtex device platforms. These had actually been announced several months ago but are now ready to ship, along with the other key elements to the whole FPGA design package that make the technology more accessible – evaluation kits and software.
Peckham told me that the next stage will be ‘domain specific’ developments kits that are due in Q4 and these will help designers looking to focus on areas such as embedded, connectivity, DSP etc. Later again will be market-specific daughter boards will be rolled out in the coming year to further ease the implementation of FPGA technology in more defined sectors (e.g.. Broadcast, video comms).
There are two curious things about this. One is the spread between launch dates of all parts of the package. This is nothing unique to Xilinx, most companies do this to some extent, but in this case what do you do if you, for example, want to use an FPGA for DSP in a broadcast application. Do you strike out boldly on your own armed only with your new FPGA device, or do you wait for a few months until the ‘domain kit’ for DSPs is released to make your job easier, or do you go the whole hog and sit on your hands for a year until the ‘market specific’ broadcast kit becomes available?
A more general observation is the extent to which these evaluation kits are migrating FPGAs into ICs that, for want of a better way of putting it, are application specific. The big difference of course is that for as long as programmability exists the flexibility remains. Peckham pointed out that there is a requirement for standard features that is using up some of the chips capacity. “Hard PCI Express is built into the FPGA’s because most people will use it,” he said. “Such features currently use about 10% of the device, so it is not completely programmable any more. Our job is to get this balance between features and flexibility right.”
It will be interesting to see how specialised the offering can become while still retaining its flexibility as a development tool.
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