lovesinghal wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> I have some general questions related to FPGA.
> What do people in this forum see is the future of FPGA 4 to 5 years
> down the line?
> What are the applications it is most widely used right now, and what
> will be the applications that it will be highly used in a near future?
> Currently, on average, a consumer (who may own cellphone, camera,
> camcorder, ipod, etc.) owns zero FPGAs. Do you see this ratio of number
> of FPGAs/consumer changing?
>
> Or. Do you see power and clock speed to continue to remain as major
> bottlenecks for FPGAs compared to ASICs in the next few years? Or will
> the difference diminish in sub 65nm technologies? Or will it blow up??
>
> There are two main advantages, as I see, of FPGAs over ASICs or
> processors - ability to implement designs faster (shorter time to
> market) and ability to perform easy "firmware updates". Will these two
> factors ever influence the decisions of designers to switch to FPGAs
> completely in the future?

What about the NRE costs of ASICs ?

>
> If you are not as optimistic about FPGAs as I am sounding, what major
> bottlenecks do you think will check FPGA growth?
>
> I am starting my PhD in FPGAs (and looking for topics of research!?!)
> and thus interested in knowing the future uses of FPGAs.
>
> Thanks.

You can forecast FPGA trends a little by looking at the foundres.

eg Look up the recent PR by TSMC, that their first release devices on
65nm will be power optimised, not speed optimised, driven by customer
demand.

Also, a new entrant 'mix' in the FPGA arena comes from ST,
http://www.st.com/stonline/books/ascii/docs/11335.htm

They call this a "RECONFIGURABLE MICRO-CONTROLLER WITH DUAL MAC DSP"
which has 16MBit DRAM, 300MHz ARM9, 600MHZ DSP, and a 200K FPGA,
Dual ethernet, ADC/DAC....

FPGAs have been moving from custom-cell-less ( simple sea of LCs ) to
include more hard silicon blocks, like multipliers, RAM, DSP kernal
cells, and even uP.
That trend will continue, & the 'Gate Array' name no longer strictly
applies.

-jg