Forecasting is a challenging task because highlighting what’s new often means examining the past. This is especially true this year, as the playing field is changing and new players are emerging but the trends remain the same as last year.
Multicore is now a matter of numbers rather than speculation. Power is minimized while performance is maximized. And, banks of serial links remain the dominant form for high-bandwidth connectivity.
Furthermore, designers can expect a couple of other trends to continue, such as a blending of FPGAs and CPUs and the emergence of high-density, nonvolatile storage using MRAM or phase-change technology.
FPGA With Processors Or Vice Versa?
Intel’s E600C is not the first micro to be combined with an FPGA, but it’s likely to spawn more competition in this arena. It’s already showing up in platforms like Kontron’s Microspace MSMST PCIe/104 board (Fig. 1).
The Microspace PCIe/104 single-board computer (SBC) houses the Intel Atom E6x5C series processor. The E6xxC chips combine an Atom system-on-a-chip (SoC) core with an Altera FPGA. PCI Express (PCIe) links tie the two together. The stackable PCIe/104 runs the other Atom PCI Express links up the stack.
FPGAs with hard-core processors aren’t new, but typically, a host CPU was off-chip. On-chip CPUs provided programmatic support. The E6xxC puts the Atom in the primary position because of the surrounding, hard peripherals including the graphics and audio support.
The FPGA can be viewed more as an accelerator or custom I/O interface, though it’s even possible to drop in a soft-core processor for a custom multicore solution. The possibilities are intriguing.
Expect even more Arm hard-core processors inside FPGAs. Microsemi’s SmartFusion FPGA incorporates a Cortex-M3 along with a programmable analog subsystem (see “FPGA Combines Hard-Core Cortex-M3 And Analog Peripherals"). This is a significant amount of fixed logic combined with an FPGA.
Xilinx (see “Xilinx Unifies FPGA Line”) and Altera (see “Climb On Board Next-Generation FPGAs”) will be taking the 28-nm route for their FPGAs. Hard-core processors with these FPGAs will finally see the light of day this year.
Achronix has hitched its wagon to Intel and its 22-nm technology (see “Speedy 22-nm FPGA Packs PicoPIPEs”). Achronix will challenge Xilinx and Altera in the top end, but the Achronix product line does not target the low end.
The compamy to watch is Tabula. Its ABAX FPGA uses a dynamic reconfiguration approach by design where the underlying fabric can change every clock cycle (see “FPGAs Enter The Third Dimension”).
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