Time was when an FPGA was simply a field programmable gate array. It was used to prototype new circuit designs and not much else.
But the FPGA has ridden the wave of system-on-chip design and has seen its use expanded significantly. What started as the IC equivalent of the breadboard is now being used at the heart of production systems ranging from wireless basestations to radar systems.
The FPGA has changed and in my view there are even greater changes around the corner.
Two factors are at work in the FPGA market. The established suppliers are adding products which change the perception of what designers can use an FPGA for. At the heart of this is the expectation that the FPGA will become a system-on-chip device finely-tuned in terms of processing power, I/O and memory to specific tasks. As a result, it has the potential will become the core element in many communications, consumer and industrial systems.
The second factor, has been the emergence in the FPGA market, which is dominated by two companies Xilinx and Altera, of new suppliers with new variants on the FPGA concept. One example is Achronix which only this week unveiled a 1.5GHz clocked FPGA based on asynchronous logic.
What I see happening is that as the established suppliers add complexity and move their FPGAs into the heart of the lucrative system-on-chip market, there will be opportunities in the traditional FPGA market for new types of high speed bridge chips and interface devices from both established suppliers and new entrants.
This will be good news for developers because it will expand the range of design options at both ends of the market - in the general purpose programmable logic designs and in the more complex system-on-chip devices.
The only fly in the ointment as I can see it is power consumption. FPGAs are not known for their power efficiency.
This has improved over the years. Some of this comes from sub-90nm process technology and the use of different transistor architectures, but power remains the one key area for development by all suppliers.