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2016 Year in Preview: The Future of FPGA

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FPGA

During the 2015 Community Awards, we asked you to take a cursory look into the future and give us your predictions for the new platforms and technologies that are likely to dominate in 2016.


Even though it didn't make the initial nominations, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) evidently captured your attention, as it was a subject that came up time and again in the comments, and also in the Technology of the Year polls.


It's reasonable to consider FPGA, which already has a global market value above $5 billion that's expected to land closer to $10 billion over the next few years, as the evolution of programmable ROMs due to their reconfigurable logic blocks and complex input/output functions.


But they're also so much more.


What's Next for Field Programmable Gate Arrays?


We'd considered how to look deeper into this, and other hot technologies, as part of our 2015 Year in Review. But ultimately it's you guys who have the deeper knowledge, so instead we'd like to look forward into 2016 rather than looking back at 2015.


We want your thoughts on the future of FPGA. How will it evolve, how will it reach a wider user base, and what kind of changes will it undergo over the next 12 months. What will the FPGA look like in New Year 2016, and what kind of projects will you be making with them.


Tell us all about the future of FPGA below (and what you'd like to see, as much as what we will see), and we'll reconvene this time next year to see how close we got to the mark.

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  • Here are my opinions.

     

    1.  In 2015, Xilinx and Altera mostly pushed their high-end FPGA families.  This is where their profits are and expanding the low-end Spartan and Cyclone lines eats away at those profits.  I expect more of the same for 2016.  I don't know if Intel's aquisition of Altera is going to change anything -- the fundamentals of what Altera does are still the same.

     

    2.  FPGA vendors don't seem that interested in expanding their user base.  I read comments that their tools keep getting harder to use and I often read of newbies getting swamped by the complexity of vendor tools and newer FPGA architectures.  I design FPGAs professionally and I've been using Xilinx tools since version 5.2 so I got used to their complexity gradually over the years (I now use 12.4).  I'd hate to be a newbie, though.  You get all the complexity thrown at you at once.  I also have the advantage of having designed FPGA tools, so I can guess at how they work and guess at what to do when they don't.

     

    The Xilinx tools do produce excellent FPGA implementations if you know what you're doing.  But they are intended for professional FPGA designers and can be daunting for newbies.

     

    Spartan-6 is now the "sweet spot" for Xilinx.  Spartan-6 is a powerful architecture, but it's really complex -- much more so than the Spartan-3 family which is a much cleaner architecture.  For example, Spartan-6 now has a separate user manual for clocking.  This used to be just a chapter.  So when you get an error or warning from the tools regarding clocking, be prepared to break out the mountain-climbing equipment to get up that learning curve.

     

    3.  On the other hand, I have good things to say about Lattice's iCE40 family, which they added to their offerings when they bought Silicon Blue.  iCE40 is a clean and simple architecture, prefect for learning about FPGAs.  It also has one of the lowest cost development boards, the US$23.50 iCEstick which plugs into a USB port for power and programming.

     

    I can't comment on FPGA tools from Lattice itself, because I've never used them.  Instead, I use the IceStorm tools which give you an open-source tool chain for the iCE40 HX1K and HX8K.  Lattice is the first FPGA that has a complete set of open-source tools, which makes it possible to create other FPGA tools and design languages that are better suited to new FPGA users.  I'm working on such tools myself (XXICC and its Flavia tools) but unfortunately I'm swamped with family obligations so I've had to put further development on hold for a while.

     

    The iCE40 also has a very nice educational "Go Board" from Nandland, funded by a Kickstarter that just ended.  It's a nice board with built-in push-buttons, discrete LEDs, 7-segment displays, and VGA output.  Like iCEstick, it plugs into a USB port for power and programming.  It's a great target for small-to-medium FPGA projects because everything is on the same board, and it supports open-source tools.

     

    4.  I would love to see the prices of FPGA development boards come down to Raspberry Pi levels.  It's silly that you can get a reasonably powerful Linux machine for US$5, but a low-end FPGA board costs at least $20 and Spartan-6 boards cost $75 or more.  I guess most of the problem is that FPGA boards aren't manufactured is large enough quantity to get the price down, and they won't be until enough people want to buy them -- which won't happen until they're a lot cheaper.  Catch-22 number 1.  Plus, large numbers of people won't get into designing FPGAs until they get a lot easier to design, but that won't happen unless there are enough (potential) users and boards out there to make easy-to-use tools worth developing.  Catch-22 number 2.

     

    Fortunately, the combination of IceStorm on iCEstick has broken this cycle, and Nandland's Go Board has the potential to help a lot, particularly if its quantity can be increased to the point that the board could be $25 instead of $50.  There's great potential here, and I'm hopeful for 2016 -- particularly when I can get back to XXICC image

Comment

  • Here are my opinions.

     

    1.  In 2015, Xilinx and Altera mostly pushed their high-end FPGA families.  This is where their profits are and expanding the low-end Spartan and Cyclone lines eats away at those profits.  I expect more of the same for 2016.  I don't know if Intel's aquisition of Altera is going to change anything -- the fundamentals of what Altera does are still the same.

     

    2.  FPGA vendors don't seem that interested in expanding their user base.  I read comments that their tools keep getting harder to use and I often read of newbies getting swamped by the complexity of vendor tools and newer FPGA architectures.  I design FPGAs professionally and I've been using Xilinx tools since version 5.2 so I got used to their complexity gradually over the years (I now use 12.4).  I'd hate to be a newbie, though.  You get all the complexity thrown at you at once.  I also have the advantage of having designed FPGA tools, so I can guess at how they work and guess at what to do when they don't.

     

    The Xilinx tools do produce excellent FPGA implementations if you know what you're doing.  But they are intended for professional FPGA designers and can be daunting for newbies.

     

    Spartan-6 is now the "sweet spot" for Xilinx.  Spartan-6 is a powerful architecture, but it's really complex -- much more so than the Spartan-3 family which is a much cleaner architecture.  For example, Spartan-6 now has a separate user manual for clocking.  This used to be just a chapter.  So when you get an error or warning from the tools regarding clocking, be prepared to break out the mountain-climbing equipment to get up that learning curve.

     

    3.  On the other hand, I have good things to say about Lattice's iCE40 family, which they added to their offerings when they bought Silicon Blue.  iCE40 is a clean and simple architecture, prefect for learning about FPGAs.  It also has one of the lowest cost development boards, the US$23.50 iCEstick which plugs into a USB port for power and programming.

     

    I can't comment on FPGA tools from Lattice itself, because I've never used them.  Instead, I use the IceStorm tools which give you an open-source tool chain for the iCE40 HX1K and HX8K.  Lattice is the first FPGA that has a complete set of open-source tools, which makes it possible to create other FPGA tools and design languages that are better suited to new FPGA users.  I'm working on such tools myself (XXICC and its Flavia tools) but unfortunately I'm swamped with family obligations so I've had to put further development on hold for a while.

     

    The iCE40 also has a very nice educational "Go Board" from Nandland, funded by a Kickstarter that just ended.  It's a nice board with built-in push-buttons, discrete LEDs, 7-segment displays, and VGA output.  Like iCEstick, it plugs into a USB port for power and programming.  It's a great target for small-to-medium FPGA projects because everything is on the same board, and it supports open-source tools.

     

    4.  I would love to see the prices of FPGA development boards come down to Raspberry Pi levels.  It's silly that you can get a reasonably powerful Linux machine for US$5, but a low-end FPGA board costs at least $20 and Spartan-6 boards cost $75 or more.  I guess most of the problem is that FPGA boards aren't manufactured is large enough quantity to get the price down, and they won't be until enough people want to buy them -- which won't happen until they're a lot cheaper.  Catch-22 number 1.  Plus, large numbers of people won't get into designing FPGAs until they get a lot easier to design, but that won't happen unless there are enough (potential) users and boards out there to make easy-to-use tools worth developing.  Catch-22 number 2.

     

    Fortunately, the combination of IceStorm on iCEstick has broken this cycle, and Nandland's Go Board has the potential to help a lot, particularly if its quantity can be increased to the point that the board could be $25 instead of $50.  There's great potential here, and I'm hopeful for 2016 -- particularly when I can get back to XXICC image

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