Challenges and Opportunities for FPGA Programmable System Platforms

Process technology and architecture innovation are the two engines that have fueled a spectacular advancement in FPGAs over the past 10 years. During this period, the price of FPGAs has been reduced with 2 orders of magnitude, the logic capacity of FPGAs has been increased with 2 orders of magnitude and the performance has been increased with one order of magnitude. Whereas ASICs buck the tide of processing technology, FPGAs ride the tide. Deep submicron effects are breaking the traditional modular design flow of traditional SOC architectures. A growing portion of the design time is spent on dealing with deep submicron effects, at the expense of the creative process of design authoring. Surveys show that, today, less than 20% of the design time, for complex SOCs, is spent on design authoring.