Why FPGAs?

Recently I began to ask myself whether FPGAs will start to play a major role in embedded field, in fact in those applications requiring fast processing power, they already have a big word to say.

So, which advantages can they bring into the play? Well I think the answer to this question resides in the short history about foundation of Xilinx company on Wikipedia:

While working for Zilog, Freeman wanted to create chips that acted like a blank tape, allowing users to program the technology themselves. At the time, the concept was paradigm-changing.[5] “The concept required lots of transistors and, at that time, transistors were considered extremely precious – people thought that Ross’s idea was pretty far out”, said Xilinx Fellow Bill Carter, who when hired in 1984 as the first IC designer was the company’s eighth employee

But nowadays silicon became really cheap and that vision practically opened the gates of a new era in which hardware resources could be considered infinite in terms of speed and space … As you may have guessed this implies a significant concept shift, almost completely breaking with the ancient paradigm of microcontroller programming and sequential execution flow of programs, but let’s see what could be the advantages:

… like Pheonix bird

After a fairly long period of absence I thought is again time to write some impressions on this blog that I almost forgot of it. Indeed it has been a pretty long while since I last hit the “publish” button but never is too late …
But, what happened in the meantime? (techinically speaking) Well there have been pretty many things, I would say in their their majority gathered around programmable logic subject, there were some good tutorials on Xilinx’s page, but also I found the blog of this guy that it really guides the reader from basic things, like how to setup an FPGA development environment, to how to play with MicroBlaze configuration, it is indeed an intrpduction to FPGA design from scratch … probaly I will also start a new category on this blog about this matter

Microcontrollers vs FPGAs

…or the future of microcontrollers woow that sounds geek!

I have to confess that I had no intention to switch the discussion from smartphones (or Java lectures) towards such topic unless I had not received the newsletter from embedded.com: Tech Focus: FPGAs vs. MCUs/MPUs: It’s no longer either/or .

Well… I would think this is an absolutely valid topic, which is the next embedded design trend, how will it look like, the future of embedded systems, will we still largely use microcontrollers, or will those be gradually replaced by FPGAs?