The History, Status, and Future of FPGAs

Re:The History, Status, and Future of FPGAs by variaga on Thursday July 23, 2020 @11:55AM (#23928680)

Of the half-dozen semiconductor- designing companies I've worked for, all of them used FPGAs for emulation.

- modern FPGAs are huge.

- when an asic design won't fit in a single FPGA, it's usually possible to partition the design into multiple FPGAs

- software emulation/ simulation is not guaranteed to be "more accurate". FPGAs can interact with a real-world environment in ways that simulation simply cannot

- simulations run 1000s of times slower than FPGAs. Months of simulation time can be covered in minutes on the FPGA

Edit: to be clear, they all use simulation too, but FPGAs are used to accelerate the verification process

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Re:The History, Status, and Future of FPGAs by GeorgeTirebiter on Thursday July 23, 2020 @10:23PM (#23935037)

Is that still true in 2020? Or is the simulation getting good enough to skip the FPGA prototyping phase?

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Re:The History, Status, and Future of FPGAs by brandmeyer on Thursday July 23, 2020 @11:09PM (#23935302)

Its still very much true. ASIC designs are described as massively parallel tiny communicating sequential processes. FPGA's are also extremely fine-grained CSP, to a degree that is much finer than anything a CPU can produce today.

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