RE: 2016 Year in Preview: The Future of FPGA

clem57 — Mon, 06 Feb 2017 03:54:03 GMT

Certainly not much has occurred this past year of 2016. Let us see if 2017 fares any better.

RE: 2016 Year in Preview: The Future of FPGA

dougw — Mon, 04 Jan 2016 02:59:56 GMT

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.

RE: 2016 Year in Preview: The Future of FPGA

johnbeetem — Sat, 02 Jan 2016 20:19:59 GMT

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 [View:/resized-image/__size/16x16/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-fa8491d3-b9c0-4686-9690-cd710056a4a3/contentimage_5F00_1.png:16:16]