Survey of New Trends in Industry for Programmable Hardware: FPGAs, MPPAs, MPSoCs, Structured ASICs, eFPGAs and New Wave of Innovation in FPGAs

Syed Zahid Ahmed (1, 2) , Gilles Sassatelli (3) , Lionel Torres (3) , Laurent Rougé (2)

1 LIRMM - Laboratoire d'Informatique de Robotique et de Microélectronique de Montpellier
2 MENTA S.A.S.
3 SysMIC - Conception et Test de Systèmes MICroélectroniques

We will present a survey of trends in the semiconductor industry for programmable hardware. The main objective of this paper is educational and the focus is FPGAs and its related or vs technologies which have emerged mostly in the second half of the last decade. We will try to analyze what were the prominent reasons for emerging of these technologies. What are the advantages and drawbacks of them, what makes FPGAs still most dominant in this area and will it be same or change in future. FPGAs themselves during this time have dramatically changed and the classical term FPGA does not fully characterize in name what FPGAs have actually become now. These changes and the continuing rising strength of multicore and ultimate power consumption challenge in industry will have what impact. Will these technologies collide or co-exist in future (nobody in industry or academics knows that and it is hard to predict). We will try to present the distinguishing technical and commercial potentials of different technologies which give an edge of one over the other.

Mots clés: FPGAs dominance; Importance of Standards; FPGAs vs MPSoC like solutions; Software vs Hardware; Processor in FPGA vs FPGA in Processor

Domaines: Micro et nanotechnologies/Microélectronique

Syed Zahid Ahmed, Gilles Sassatelli, Lionel Torres, Laurent Rougé. Survey of New Trends in Industry for Programmable Hardware: FPGAs, MPPAs, MPSoCs, Structured ASICs, eFPGAs and New Wave of Innovation in FPGAs. 2010 International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications; FPL2010, Aug 2010, Milan, Italy. pp.291-297, ⟨10.1109/FPL.2010.66⟩. ⟨hal-00736126⟩