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  • Author Author: spannerspencer
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2016 Year in Preview: The Future of FPGA

spannerspencer

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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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  • Altera is already taking advantage of Intel's crucial lead in process technology to utilize 3D tri-gate transistors in a 14 nm geometry. This is a big deal - it doubles performance and reduces power by up to 70% and of course allows a lot more devices to fit on smaller dies. Altera also has libraries for a quad-core ARM Cortex A53, which would seem to bring the latest ARM chips to 14nm. This kind of leverage has to be tough on competitors, not just FPGA manufacturers, but also ARM chip manufacturers. Intel will likely lead the way to 10 nm and 5 nm as well, which will keep the pressure on, so competitors may need to find other methods to attract customers. Hopefully it will lead to lower cost programming and simulation tools, lower cost development cards and more integrated, easier-to-use tools.

    FPGAs could well follow the example of the arduino explosion which has forced all competing manufacturers to support essentially free development environments and low cost development cards. The CPU industry understands the importance of getting new users hooked on their products and tools and I'm sure the FPGA market also understands this and some of this is already occurring. However for it to go ballistic it may take a catalyzing "killer app" at the right price to get everyone hooked on FPGAs and revolutionize the industry.

    It might be interesting to see if any e14 members have a proposal for an FPGA "killer app", but lack the resources and training to pull it off. From my perspective, (I've only "dabbled" with some Altera tools) I can think of applications, but it seems like a pretty big investment in time and money to contemplate implementing any serious applications.

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  • Altera is already taking advantage of Intel's crucial lead in process technology to utilize 3D tri-gate transistors in a 14 nm geometry. This is a big deal - it doubles performance and reduces power by up to 70% and of course allows a lot more devices to fit on smaller dies. Altera also has libraries for a quad-core ARM Cortex A53, which would seem to bring the latest ARM chips to 14nm. This kind of leverage has to be tough on competitors, not just FPGA manufacturers, but also ARM chip manufacturers. Intel will likely lead the way to 10 nm and 5 nm as well, which will keep the pressure on, so competitors may need to find other methods to attract customers. Hopefully it will lead to lower cost programming and simulation tools, lower cost development cards and more integrated, easier-to-use tools.

    FPGAs could well follow the example of the arduino explosion which has forced all competing manufacturers to support essentially free development environments and low cost development cards. The CPU industry understands the importance of getting new users hooked on their products and tools and I'm sure the FPGA market also understands this and some of this is already occurring. However for it to go ballistic it may take a catalyzing "killer app" at the right price to get everyone hooked on FPGAs and revolutionize the industry.

    It might be interesting to see if any e14 members have a proposal for an FPGA "killer app", but lack the resources and training to pull it off. From my perspective, (I've only "dabbled" with some Altera tools) I can think of applications, but it seems like a pretty big investment in time and money to contemplate implementing any serious applications.

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  • in reply to dougw

    A "killer app" that lots of people are talking about regarding Intel's Altera acquisition is making data center computations more efficient by using FPGAs to accelerate search and other operations.  I don't know what the state of the art is on this sort of thing, but I remember people talking about "database machines" decades ago.  They didn't get anywhere -- Moore's Law made general-purpose CPUs faster and cheaper than special-purpose database engines.  With Moore's Law slowing down, they might be successful this time around.

     

    I don't see Intel competing effectively with ARM chips.  They tried that before with DEC StrongARM (renamed Xscale) and ended up selling most of the technology to Marvell.  Intel likes to sell expensive high-performance CPUs, whereas ARM chips have so many competitors that the SoCs are too cheap to be profitable for Intel.  We might see an Altera with an x86 core some day.

     

    Readers who haven't heard much about Intel's Altera acquistion might be interested in last year's element14 discussion on the topic: http://www.element14.com/community/thread/43401/l/intel-buys-altera-for-54-cash-is-this-a-good-thing

    I haven't changed my mind about comment #4 image