Introduction to the development of FPGA

FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) is a field programmable gate array. It is a product of further development based on programmable devices such as PLA, PAL, GAL, and CPLD. It is a semi-custom circuit in the field of application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC), which not only solves the shortcomings of custom circuits, but also overcomes the shortcomings of the limited number of original programmable device gates.

1, FPGA introduction

FPGAs are commonly used to implement digital circuit modules. Users can reconfigure logic modules and I/O modules inside the FPGA to meet user needs. It also features static reprogrammability and dynamic system refactoring, allowing hardware functions to be modified programmatically like software. It is no exaggeration to say that an FPGA can perform any digital device function, down to a simple 74 circuit, up to a high-performance CPU, can be implemented with an FPGA. FPGAs are like a piece of white paper or a stack of wood, and engineers can freely design a digital system using traditional schematic input methods or hardware description languages.

2, The history of FPGA development

The development history of FPGA is shown in the figure below. Compared with PROM, PAL/GAL, and CPLD, FPGAs have higher scale performance.

The mainstream manufacturers of FPGA chips include Xilinx, Altera, Lattice, and Microsemi, with the first two market shares totaling 88%.

In December 2015, Intel acquired Altera Corporation for $16.7 billion. Shortly after the acquisition, Altera developed a product roadmap for integrating Intel processors with FPGAs. The benefit of these two product integrations is the ability to deliver innovative heterogeneous multi-core architectures that meet the needs of new markets such as artificial intelligence while dramatically reducing power consumption.

FPGAs are very mature and widely used in aerospace, military, and telecommunications. Taking the telecommunications field as an example, in the telecom equipment integration stage, the FPGA is analyzed by the application network protocol and interface conversion due to its programming flexibility and high performance.

In the NFV (Network Function Virtualization) stage, the FPGA implements 5 times performance improvement of the network element data based on the general server and the hypervisor, and can be managed by the general Openstack framework.

In the cloud era, FPGA has been used as a basic IaaS resource to provide development services and acceleration services in the public cloud.

As of now, Intel's StraTIx 10 devices have been successfully applied to the Brainwave project of the Microsoft real-time artificial intelligence cloud platform.

This article is from Allicdata Electronics Limited.