Interaction with Xilinx-India CTO on FPGA design issues and trends

The role of FPGAs in embedded systems is only increasing, asking every embedded system developer to get more familiarity with programmable silicon along with ASICs.
The fables semiconductor vendor Xilinx; is the number one leader with more than 50% share in world's programmable logic semiconductor device market. Hardly you find an FPGA user in India, who is not familiar with Spartan family of FPGAs from Xilinx. Though there is no official figures available about Xilinx's share in India's FPGA market, based on few of the facts, it can be estimated Xilinx serves more than 50% of India's programmable logic semiconductor market. Quite a higher share compared to its closest competitor.

Vamsi Boppana, Senior Director and CTO of Xilinx India, answers on design related issues and trends in FPGA area.

Q1. What are the present FPGA board design challenges?

Vamsi Boppana: To support high-speed transceivers, the board designer has to look into signal integrity challenges on his circuit board. It's also tough to implement any small tweaks in later stage of design. That's why we make ready reference designs available for them to start from scratch and complete the design faster.

Q2. What about power consumption?
Vamsi Boppana: FPGA has programmable group of transistors compared to ASIC, due to which FPGA is inevitably consume more power. But in recent times, FPGA chip developers are using advanced tricks and concepts to consume low current.

Q3. Can FPGA be used for portable applications?

Vamsi Boppana: FPGA is still not a preferred device for handset type applications, but there is new set of applications called tabletop devices where FPGA can be used. Medical electronics is one good example.

We are working continuously to reduce power consumption, now when we move to next level of manufacturing process, we focus more on power rather than frequency enhancement. We have devices operating at 0.9 volts.

Q4. Can you give examples of popular processor IP cores used in FPGA?

Vamsi Boppana: ARM processor IP core is quite popular, PowerPC is another popular processor IP core, and we have our own MicroBlaze IP.

Q5. What about 8051?

Vamsi Boppana: 8051 is still used in few of the older MCUs. For small controllers, where the device has to perform very simple processing tasks, 8051 is still valid.

Q6. What are the emerging applications of FPGA?

Vamsi Boppana: Recently video surveillance and video analytics is one of the hot areas where FPGA is finding most useful. Plasma TVs is another application area where we have shipped large number of our high-end FPGAs. Another good example is Automotive, where luxury cars use lot of FPGAs in different part of the vehicles. However communications is the domain where the FPGAs are most used.

Q7. Is there a growing trend of building more hard ASIC type blocks inside FPGA?

Vamsi Boppana: The hard and soft blocks are provided in each of our family to make them unique.

Q8. How do you rate FPGA design skills of Indian electronic engineers?

Vamsi Boppana: On general basis, India is still young in this domain with lot of room for growth. It's easier for Indian engineers to program a chip rather than designing it.