lovesinghal wrote:
> [...]
> 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?

Although on average it is indeed very, very low, it's already more than
zero:

http://groups.google.com/groups?&q=loewe+xelos+fpga

Now, it was wondered in that and other threads if the FPGA was a
permanent fixture in the product, or a stop-gap due to high profit
margins and fast design rollout (such that once the design has settled
down, they will likely switch to an ASIC?).

> 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??

I assume Altera does this as well, but Xilinx likes to throw around
meaningless comparisons about how much it would cost their customer(s)
do to a design in the current state-of-the-art (90 nm, for example).
What they neglect to mention is that you would likely not need to use
anything close to that to achieve your performance targets (if you
design was gong to work in an FPGA), so your NRE's would likely be
considerably lower than theirs. Note that I am not saying anything
about which is actually cheaper for a given design. The actual NRE or
per-piece prices are so highly variable from one design to another that
I dont think anything except a formal quote on a particular design
would be able to tell you the answer.

> 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?

There's also resource availabilty (money and man-power, in addition to
design time, as you mentioned): at least for smaller design firms, the
obvious answer is to use FPGA's initially, for all the usual reasons.
But after it has hit the market, do you dedicate your scarce resources
to respinning that part into an ASIC, or to develop the next best thing
that might sell even better? You might take a hit of a few percent of
the gross profit margin, but in the grand scheme of things, perhaps
that is the smarter thing to do.

> If you are not as optimistic about FPGAs as I am sounding, what major
> bottlenecks do you think will check FPGA growth?

Despite the above statements, I'm fairly optimistic that overall FPGA
sales will continue to grow... I think the $/LUT has dropped low enough
that companies will continue to go for the FPGA's for all the usual
reasons.

> I am starting my PhD in FPGAs (and looking for topics of research!?!)
> and thus interested in knowing the future uses of FPGAs.

A few ideas were thrown around on a related topic recently:
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=future+fpga

Good luck,

Marc