FPGAs have been great candidates for digital system design and this has been a factor that held most of the designers to stay away from it as they have to do the analog part and then integrate them with the FPGA. Over the years there have been significant enhancements that have been brought about in the way the FPGA offerings have been made by various FPGA vendors.
The reason behind sketching this post is to throw light on some of the features that could encourage readers to go pick up FPGA as viable candidates for their next design.
To start with FPGAs are configurable platforms that could be customized through Hardware Description Languages.
Over the times using HDLs have also been eased with the introduction of various tools , For instance some of the tools that significantly boost the design time are the Model Based Design Tools, C to HDL convertors , Automated Code generators..etc.
Also available are lot of open source designs and IP that people generously donate for reuse m one such repository is the opencores.org .
On the hardware front there are various vendors who deliver FPGA devices as well as tools to target them. All the leading vendors now produce a low cost family of FPGAs and also development and evolution boards to help users get started quickly.
One of the recent breakthrough developments in the field of FPGAs has been the introduction of Mixed Signal FPGAs. Actel has been successful in delivering the worlds first Mixed Signal FPGA SMART FUSION and this bring down the gap between the analog and digital world and seems to catch up speed in the coming years.
Also available are low cost evaluation kits and i am going to get one soon and post up with my feedback.
Feel free to post in your comments, queries and discussions on this post !
