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  • Author Author: rscasny
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Poll: Why are You Developing your Current Design with an FPGA?

Microcontrollers, microprocessors, ASICs, FPGAs, heterogeneous SoCs. They all have their advantages and drawbacks. But you have to make a choice which one to use for your next design.

 

Poll question: Why are You Developing your Current Design with an FPGA?

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  • I selected "Flexibility".  When I use an FPGA, it's usually because I need an unusual I/O interface to talk to external devices or to other chips in the system.  If I just need one or two I2C, SPI or UART interfaces, a general-purpose SoC is usually the best solution.  But if I need a lot of serial ports, or serial ports with unusual properties that you can't get with a SoC, an FPGA is usually best.  With an FPGA I get precision timing down to the clock frequency of the FPGA.  Yes, you can do bit-pushing in software using general-purpose I/O pins, but you won't get anywhere the precision timing of an FPGA.  And if your CPU is running an operating system, forget any sort of precision timing.

     

    Here's one of my recent FPGA designs: An FPGA-Based Organ Tuner.  The FPGA was a nice, clean way to generate pitches using direct digital synthesis (DDS).  I probably could have done it with a SoC, but the FPGA was simple and I didn't have to figure out how to get precision timing from the SoC.

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  • I selected "Flexibility".  When I use an FPGA, it's usually because I need an unusual I/O interface to talk to external devices or to other chips in the system.  If I just need one or two I2C, SPI or UART interfaces, a general-purpose SoC is usually the best solution.  But if I need a lot of serial ports, or serial ports with unusual properties that you can't get with a SoC, an FPGA is usually best.  With an FPGA I get precision timing down to the clock frequency of the FPGA.  Yes, you can do bit-pushing in software using general-purpose I/O pins, but you won't get anywhere the precision timing of an FPGA.  And if your CPU is running an operating system, forget any sort of precision timing.

     

    Here's one of my recent FPGA designs: An FPGA-Based Organ Tuner.  The FPGA was a nice, clean way to generate pitches using direct digital synthesis (DDS).  I probably could have done it with a SoC, but the FPGA was simple and I didn't have to figure out how to get precision timing from the SoC.

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