An embedded engineer's delight: 16 nm SoC FPGA with 4 ARM Cortex A 53 cores taped out

Flexibility in hardware and software is the most wanted thing for any electronics design engineer. Complex embedded software running on large FPGA fabric gives that power to the engineer to make both hardware as well as software change according to the design requirements. But a pure FPGA is not required in lot of applications, where you need a lot of functions in hard core form. That give birth to the idea of programmable SOC, where a part of a monolithic chip is FPGA fabric and a part is multicore processor system and interface circuit. Xilinx gave to the market a product named as Zynq, the programmable SOC. Zynq is a perfect mix of hard-core logic, interface and rightly sized FPGA fabric. Zynq gave rise to a new range of applications such as Red Pitaya, an alternative to benchtop test and measurement and also to virtual PC based instrumentation. Xilinx calls this product a very successful one. When the 28 nm Zynq could create some new markets, the deeper node programmable SOCs can create even more new market-ideas in electronics. Well, if you're waiting for 2X or more powerful Zynq, here is the good news, where Xilinx has announced the successful taping out of 16 nm Zynq FPGA chip which is called as Zynq Ultrascale+ using TSMC's 16FinFET+ process. The Suggested application areas of this device includes artificial vision, self driving vehicles/driver assistan...