Top Five Benefits of FPGA Technology

1. Performance
2. Time to Market
3. Cost
4. Reliability
5. Long-Term Maintenance

1. Performance – Taking advantage of hardware parallelism, FPGAs exceed the computing power of digital signal processors (DSPs) by breaking the paradigm of sequential execution and accomplishing more per clock cycle. BDTI, a noted analyst and benchmarking firm, released benchmarks showing how FPGAs can deliver many times the processing power per dollar of a DSP solution in some applications.² Controlling inputs and outputs (I/O) at the hardware level provides faster response times and specialized functionality to closely match application requirements.

2. Time to market – FPGA technology offers flexibility and rapid prototyping capabilities in the face of increased time-to-market concerns. You can test an idea or concept and verify it in hardware without going through the long fabrication process of custom ASIC design.³ You can then implement incremental changes and iterate on an FPGA design within hours instead of weeks. Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware is also available with different types of I/O already connected to a user-programmable FPGA chip. The growing availability of high-level software tools decrease the learning curve with layers of abstraction and often include valuable IP cores (prebuilt functions) for advanced control and signal processing.

3. Cost – The nonrecurring engineering (NRE) expense of custom ASIC design far exceeds that of FPGA-based hardware solutions. The large initial investment in ASICs is easy to justify for OEMs shipping thousands of chips per year, but many end users need custom hardware functionality for the tens to hundreds of systems in development. The very nature of programmable silicon means that there is no cost for fabrication or long lead times for assembly. As system requirements often change over time, the cost of making incremental changes to FPGA designs are quite negligible when compared to the large expense of respinning an ASIC.

4. Reliability – While software tools provide the programming environment, FPGA circuitry is truly a “hard” implementation of program execution. Processor-based systems often involve several layers of abstraction to help schedule tasks and share resources among multiple processes. The driver layer controls hardware resources and the operating system manages memory and processor bandwidth. For any given processor core, only one instruction can execute at a time, and processor-based systems are continually at risk of time-critical tasks pre-empting one another. FPGAs, which do not use operating systems, minimize reliability concerns with true parallel execution and deterministic hardware dedicated to every task.

5. Long-term maintenance – As mentioned earlier, FPGA chips are field-upgradable and do not require the time and expense involved with ASIC redesign. Digital communication protocols, for example, have specifications that can change over time, and ASIC-based interfaces may cause maintenance and forward compatibility challenges. Being reconfigurable, FPGA chips are able to keep up with future modifications that might be necessary. As a product or system matures, you can make functional enhancements without spending time redesigning hardware or modifying the board layout.