The lofty rise of the lowly FPGA

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Jan. 10, 2018 – FPGA programmable logic has served in many capacities since it was introduced back in the early 80's. Recently, with designers looking for innovative ways to boost system performance, FPGA's have moved front and center. This initiative has taken on new urgency with the slowing down of process node based performance gains. The search has moved to new algorithmic and architectural innovations that can push performance forward to meet the needs of big data, cloud computing, mobile, networking and other domains.

The new applications for FPGA's are a far cry from the glue-logic uses that they first fulfilled. FPGA's have been moving up the semiconductor food chain for some time though. They were applied to networking applications by Cisco and others back in the 90's – as they entered their second decade. Most recently a major shift occurred when FPGA's were paired with CPU's to facilitate compute intensive operations. FPGA's cannot adapt to new tasks as quickly as a general-purpose CPU, but they excel at repetitive operations that involve high throughput.


Microsoft has embraced this approach for its cloud and search engine operations after they assessed its feasibility in their Catapult project. Another big mover in this space is Intel with its $16B acquisition of Altera. Long gone are the days where FPGA's were a poor man's alternative to ASIC's. Commercial FPGA's routinely are built on leading edge process nodes – to wit, Altera going to Intel 22nm for its first FinFET design. FPGA's have become quite efficient and they come with a bevy of ancillary IP and high performance IO's ensure high performance. Click here to read more ...

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