Get Your Xilinx FPGA/Programmable SoC Questions Answered here

- What trends do you see happening in the FPGA world in the upcoming years?

- Do you see FPGAs moving into the realm of PC's? GPUs, even though they are completely different, have gained a lot of attention in the general computation arena, while at the same time FPGAs haven't apparently gained much more popularity. What do think is the cause of this?

- Do you see any upcoming official opening of the bitstream formats? The formats appear to be slowly being reverse-engineered, whats is the rationale in keeping them closed? I would think that opening them would allow the creation of an ecosystem of 3rd party tools which probably would attract more users to the platform. Making software opensource could also lower development costs, etc. What are your thoughts on all this?

These are great questions.

I think the trend is pretty clear they are evolving (and have been for many years) in to platforms, which combine different compute engines e.g Programmable Logic and Processors cores. The Xilinx Versal devices take this to the next step. These heterogeneous devices enable the deployment of elements of the application being developed to the most optimal compute engine, what we will see along with rapid device development in this area is a significant increases in development SW which offers a combined platform which can be used to develop the application and then deploy elements as required in the different engines example include SDSoC, SDAccel for example.

I am not sure PC's will ever contain a programmable logic device on board the motherboard but I think programmable logic will be easily available via the cloud e.g. AWS and using modules like the Alveo card either locally or in the cloud. GPU's became popular for computation as PC do need them as well for graphics in a number of applications therefore it was a natural extension to be able to use them for computation as needed.

I do not and I am not sure why people get hung up on it in my opinion. I am not 100% sure why they are kept closed behind the need for IP protection and most importantly getting the bitstream wrong could potentially damage the device which will cause several issues. If it was me I would focus open tool development on areas such as simulation, verification, synthesis, formal verification etc I know there is work going on in this area. Regarding development costs, most vendors offer free versions which cover a significant range of components, which should address the most maker, hobbyist and many commercial applications. While the larger projects using tools which require licensing are often developed by organisations which can afford the costs. I have also found the vendors very willing to talk and support if your doing interesting projects.

These are great questions.

I think the trend is pretty clear they are evolving (and have been for many years) in to platforms, which combine different compute engines e.g Programmable Logic and Processors cores. The Xilinx Versal devices take this to the next step. These heterogeneous devices enable the deployment of elements of the application being developed to the most optimal compute engine, what we will see along with rapid device development in this area is a significant increases in development SW which offers a combined platform which can be used to develop the application and then deploy elements as required in the different engines example include SDSoC, SDAccel for example.

I am not sure PC's will ever contain a programmable logic device on board the motherboard but I think programmable logic will be easily available via the cloud e.g. AWS and using modules like the Alveo card either locally or in the cloud. GPU's became popular for computation as PC do need them as well for graphics in a number of applications therefore it was a natural extension to be able to use them for computation as needed.

I do not and I am not sure why people get hung up on it in my opinion. I am not 100% sure why they are kept closed behind the need for IP protection and most importantly getting the bitstream wrong could potentially damage the device which will cause several issues. If it was me I would focus open tool development on areas such as simulation, verification, synthesis, formal verification etc I know there is work going on in this area. Regarding development costs, most vendors offer free versions which cover a significant range of components, which should address the most maker, hobbyist and many commercial applications. While the larger projects using tools which require licensing are often developed by organisations which can afford the costs. I have also found the vendors very willing to talk and support if your doing interesting projects.

adamtaylorcengfiet  wrote:

 

 

I am not sure PC's will ever contain a programmable logic device on board the motherboard but I think programmable logic will be easily available via the cloud e.g. AWS and using modules like the Alveo card either locally or in the cloud. GPU's became popular for computation as PC do need them as well for graphics in a number of applications therefore it was a natural extension to be able to use them for computation as needed.

 

Actually, FPGAs have been placed on Motherboards for some time now,.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/11960/asus-announces-ws-c621e-sage-workstation-motherboard-dual-xeon-overclocking

Intel is now producing Xeon processors that include a FPGA in the same package as well as offering the Intel Acceleration Stack for Intel Xeon CPU with FPGAs.  However, as you mentioned, these would be more inline with the Web Giants and such due to the cost of the devices at this time. 

I like the comment regarding open source tools.  This is starting to be a thing now where folks are getting frustrated with the FPGA vendor tools and are reverse engineering the FPGA code to create their own open source tools to program the device. I suspect this will continue to expand.

I knew FPGA where on motherboards but as I understand it, it is not accessible by the user for programming instead it is smallish device which provides functions on the motherboard design. I read the question as being will FPGA be deployed on motherboards in a manner that they are accessible by the user to program and accelerate algorithms like you can with GPU's

It will be interesting to see what the open source community does, I suspect your right re reverse engineering.