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The ‘Programma
What are we talking about? Is this something new? Or is this something that has been around for 25 years, and has suddenly become more important?
What Is It?
If you look at the ‘programmable imperative’ from a customer’s point of view, you find that they wish to achieve more with less, to reduce risks wherever possible, and to be able to differentiate their product from their competitors. In the current market, customers wish to strike a balance between:
design challenges (such as cost, power, performance and density), and
business challenges (such as fickle market demands, tight engineering budgets, escalating ASIC and ASSP non-recurring engineering costs, and ever spiraling complexities).
From a Xilinx perspective, the programmable imperative represents a two-fold commitment:
first, to deliver programmable silicon innovations that supply industry-leading value for every comparison point (price, power, performance, density, features, and programmability), and
second, to provide customers with simpler, smarter and more strategically viable design platforms that reduce the time spent by creating the infrastructure of an application and allowing them more time to create their own unique product.
The result is a better product, produced in less time, at less cost.
What is Different?
The mid-range Xilinx® FPGA device is now fast enough and large enough to do what used to be the sole domain of the ASIC. This is a big change over the time when the devices were either too small, too slow, or both.
Risk, and the Cost of Failure
Given the present business climate, having a solution that allows problems in the field to be fixed by updating and downloading a new bit file delivers a product more in line with the model for software. Some customers actually plan on leaving room in their FPGA to provide space for features that they plan to sell as add-ons into their markets in the future. Their products are always “fresh” and capable of providing extra value.
The ASIC solution, in comparison, is a “fire and forget” solution: you have one chance, and you either succeed momentarily (no possibility of further revenue), or fail.
Austin Lesea
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kcmman
- Ken Chapman holds a first class BSc Degree with honours in Electronic and Electrical Engineering from the University of Surrey. Before obtaining his degree, he spent 4 years working in production environments, making precision instruments and working his way through all levels of a small electronics company. He spent 4 years at Racal Radar Defense Systems combining detailed digital design with all aspects of system integration. Ken joined the UK division of Xilinx in 1991, and was instrumental in developing innovative methods of implementing DSP functions in the Xilinx devices. He has filed several patents while at Xilinx, including the 'MULT_AND' gate seen in each Virtex™ and Spartan-II™ device that has made multipliers and other arithmetic functions smaller and faster.
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peter.a
- Peter Alfke joined Xilinx in 1988 as director of applications engineering. He currently serves as Distinguished Engineer in the Advanced Products Group. He graduated in electronic engineering from the Technical University in Hannover, Germany in 1957. He went on to work in telecom and computer design with LM Ericsson and Litton Industries before moving to California in 1968. He has spent forty years in Applications Engineering with Fairchild, Zilog, AMD, and now Xilinx. He holds more than thirty patents, has authored many application notes, and given worldwide seminars on digital integrated circuits. He is active in the newsgroup comp.arch.fpga.
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austin.lesea
- Austin graduated from UC Berkeley in 1974 and 1975 with his BS EECS in Electromagnetic (E&M) Theory and MS EECS in Communications and Information Theory. He has worked in the telecommunications field for 20 years designing optical, microwave, and copper- based transmission systems. He developed SONET/SDH GPS-based Timing Systems for 12 of those years. For the last ten years at Xilinx, Austin was in the IC Design department for the Virtex product line. His new role is working for Xilinx Research Labs, where he is looking beyond the present technology issues.
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