6. Conclusion
In the 1980s, the first FPGA circuits were limited to interfacing tasks between different integrated circuits on the same printed circuit board. Significant technological developments in the 1990s brought FPGAs with many configurable resources to market. From this point onwards, FPGAs became alternatives to ASICs in many small-batch and prototyping applications. The massive integration of many configurable resources, memory blocks, optimized computation operators and embedded processors in the 2000s led to an explosion in the use of FPGAs in the world of electronics. Today's FPGAs can implement the functions of several million logic gates. It is now possible to use FPGAs to build complete systems-on-a-chip, or SoCs, for highly complex applications, which would be much more costly or risky to build using ASICs, and without the guarantee of being able to design a fully functional circuit...
The Ultimate Scientific and Technical Reference
This article is included in
Software technologies and System architectures
This offer includes:
Knowledge Base
Updated and enriched with articles validated by our scientific committees
Services
A set of exclusive tools to complement the resources
Practical Path
Operational and didactic, to guarantee the acquisition of transversal skills
Doc & Quiz
Interactive articles with quizzes, for constructive reading
Conclusion
Bibliography
Software tools
VPR: a set of CAD tools for FPGAs made by the University of Toronto. Initially specialized for placement/routing phases. Now available for other phases of the FPGA design flow. http://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/vpr/
Synplify: logic synthesis tool for FPGA circuits marketed by Synopsys, capable of synthesizing different FPGAs...
Events
FPGA: ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays http://www.isfpga.org
FPL: International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications. 22nd edition in 2012 http://www.fpl.org/
FPT: International Conference on Field-Programmable...
Directory
Manufacturers – Suppliers – Distributors (non-exhaustive list)
Xilinx http://www.xilinx.com
Altera http://www.altera.com
Actel http://www.actel.com
...
The Ultimate Scientific and Technical Reference
