What is the main development direction of FPGA technology?
The fundamental reason why FPGA technology has huge potential market is that FPGA can not only achieve the advantages of miniaturization, low power consumption, high reliability of electronic systems, but also its short development cycle, low investment, and the continuous decline in chip prices. With the continuous improvement of the level of chip design technology, FPGA technology has shown the following three main development trends.
1. Design scheme based on IP library
The density of future FPGA chips continues to increase, and traditional HDL-based code design methods are difficult to meet the design needs of very large-scale FPGAs. With the increasing number of professional IP library design companies, the types of commercial IP libraries will become more and more comprehensive, and the supported FPGA devices will become more and more extensive.
As an FPGA designer, the main job is to find IP library resources suitable for the project needs, and then integrate these IPs to complete the top-level module design. Since commercial IP libraries are all verified, the simulation and verification of the entire project is mainly to verify the correctness of the interface logic design of the IP library.
At present, due to the imperfect domestic laws and regulations on the protection of intellectual property rights, the design method based on the IP library has not been widely used. However, as FPGA density continues to increase and the price of IP libraries gradually tends to be rationalized, this design solution will become the mainstream FPGA design technology.
2. FPGA-based embedded system (SOPC) technology is maturing
System-on-chip SoC (SystemonChip) technology refers to the integration of a complete product function on a chip or chipset. SoC is developed from the perspective of the system as a whole, based on the IP (Intellectualproperty) core, using the hardware description language as the description method of the system function and structure, with the help of the computer-based EDA tool. Because the SoC design can comprehensively consider the entire system, it can achieve higher system performance. The emergence of SoC is a revolution in the field of electronic system design, and its impact will be far-reaching and extensive.
On-chip programmable system SOPC (SystemonaProgrammableChip) is a flexible and efficient SoC solution. It integrates the functional modules required by the system such as processor, memory, I/O port and LVDS into an FPGA to form a programmable system on chip.
Because it is a programmable system, it has a flexible design, can be cut, expanded, and upgraded, and has the function of software and hardware programmable.
SOPC maintains the SoC's system-centric, multi-level and high reuse characteristics based on IP modules, and has the advantages of short design cycle, small risk investment and low design cost. Through the synthesis, analysis and reduction of design software, SOPC can Reconstruct the required embedded system flexibly.
The core of this technology is to build a processor inside the FPGA chip. Xilinx mainly provides hard core solutions based on PowerPC, while Altera provides soft core solutions based on NIOSII. Altera provides a complete software and hardware solution for the NIOSII soft core processor, which can help customers complete the construction and debugging of the SOPC system in a short time.
3. FPGA chips are developing in the direction of high performance, high density, low voltage and low power consumption
With the continuous improvement of chip production technology, the performance and density of FPGA chips are constantly improving. The early FPGA mainly completed the interface logic design, such as the AD/DA and DSP glue logic. Now FPGA is becoming the core component of the circuit to complete key functions.
In high-performance computing and high-throughput I/O applications, FPGAs have replaced dedicated DSP chips as the best implementation. Therefore, high performance and high density have also become important indicators to measure the design capabilities of FPGA chip manufacturers.
As FPGA performance and density increase, power consumption has gradually become a bottleneck for FPGA applications. Although FPGAs have lower power consumption than processors such as DSPs, they are significantly higher than the power consumption of dedicated chips (ASICs). FPGA manufacturers are also using various new processes and technologies to reduce FPGA power consumption, and have achieved significant results.
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