Where are FPGA heading?

Reading the LSI Strucutred ASIC fiasco thread has made me think.
People are saying the FPGA revenues are going to grow, so....

Which markets are FPGA heading into?

I mean, at the moment there's Comms, Medical, Military, Consumer.

Where are they going next? 

Automotive I guess is coming, as is aerospace. You could put the two
together, as control electronics. 

How about seeing them in a PC? 

What are your views on the matter?

John C <brakepiston@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>Reading the LSI Strucutred ASIC fiasco thread has made me think.
>People are saying the FPGA revenues are going to grow, so....

>Which markets are FPGA heading into?

>I mean, at the moment there's Comms, Medical, Military, Consumer.
>Where are they going next? 

>Automotive I guess is coming, as is aerospace. You could put the two
>together, as control electronics. 

Aerospace posses issues with ionizing radiation.

>How about seeing them in a PC? 

When there's an advantage of reconfiguration ability over static asic
massproduced at low price. A possible app could be builtin reciever for
television, modem etc.. that can be adapted fast to new codecs
post manufacture.

I want a board with a few of the largest Spartan3e chips, a little
SRAM, and a PCIExpress 8x slot and controller for under $300. Until
that happens, FPGAs are not in the consumer market in my opinion. All
the current consumer boards lack one necessary feature for general
purpose acceleration and coprocessing: datastream bandwidth. Tinkering
with gates (like one would do with current Digilent starter kits)
should not be considered a consumer product; that is in the hobbiest
arena.

I've worked with the FPGAs in the military some. They use it mostly for
image de/compression and de/encryption -- the obvious uses for them.
Bandwidth is a huge concern on every FPGA application I've ever worked
with, especially with the military. I just wish that thinking would
propagate down to the consumer level. Somehow the graphics card
companies seem to have a grip on it, while other general coprocessing
hardware seems to have been skipped over lightly.

John C,

Automotive is happening (big) right now.

Latest (can't say which) luxury car has 10+ Xilinx FPGAs in it.

One car.

10+ FPGAs.

Replaced all the microcontrollers.

Why?  Because the microcontrollers can not be maintained for ten years, 
whereas the car maker can always buy any future version of our FPGA, and 
put their old VHDL/verilog into it.  Maintaining stock for all cars sold 
for replacement assemblies for ten years was driving the maker broke 
(pun intended).



Consumer is going gangbusters.  LCD TV's, plasma panel TV's.  Why?

Because ASICs are a bad investment.  The actual number of TVs sold for 
each country is small compared to the overall numbers.  Each country is 
just slightly different.  The TVs change every six months.  So making 
TVs for Taiwan, China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, etc. 
etc. is a huge headache.  And if the ASIC doesn't work, the risk is 
enormous.


PC's?

Already there, but it is small compared to everything else.  We are in 
video display cards (I have one in my home PC, which can drive two 
displays at once, and the mouse will go from one to the next...).  We 
are in high end accelerator cards, instrumentation cards, etc.  Still 
like to see more business here, and it will happen with PCI express 
which is just starting to ramp now.


Military/Aerospace

Huge growth here.  Why?  Because ASICs are really pretty much dead for 
this market.  Not because of cost (which helps), but because of 
reprogramability.  The "mission" changes, and thus if the entire jet 
fighter is "soft" or "firm" it can be reprogrammed...

And there is the software defined radio retrofit of all military forces 
for all allies and their partners (read the whole world, pretty much) 
and the homeland security need to retrofit all public safety (police 
fire medical) radios to interoperate with the military...


Embedded systems

Everywhere there is a processor + stuff.  A 20 billion $ market, which 
we are able to contribute to.  More than 40% of it is Power PC based. 
So we play well here, and add a lot of value with our EMACs, APU 
interface, 405PPC, and thousands of programmable CLBs.


'Extreme' DSP

Anytime you can't solve the problem with a DSP processor.  Or when you 
need peripherals for a DSP processor (you then use a FPGA instead). 
Another 20 billion $ market which we play in the top end of.  Cell phone 
base stations, medical scanners, so on and so forth.


Looks like there is growth (for us), and lots of it, in our future.

Of course, that is our perspective, which is from where we sit, and what 
we see happening.  Others will have their view.

Austin

pd....

-snip-

>>Automotive I guess is coming, as is aerospace. You could put the two
>>together, as control electronics.

Both there now.  Account for them as you will.  We have a 
Aerospace/Defense/Automotive Division today.

> Aerospace posses issues with ionizing radiation.

Which is why we offer the QPro series, and have onging research into 
solving all the problems in these applications.

-snip again-

> When there's an advantage of reconfiguration ability over static asic
> massproduced at low price. A possible app could be builtin reciever for
> television, modem etc.. that can be adapted fast to new codecs
> post manufacture.

Already in them.  The sets are programmed just as they are leaving (for 
country, etc.).



Austin

Consumer items do have the advantage of volume manufacture and recovery of 
development costs on a few hundred board does tend to make them dearer than 
that market never mind thge dearer manufacture costs.

Wait a long while and maybe and our Raggedstone2 will bring what you want 
but don't expect it this side of Christmas. It's on the roadmap but not for 
a long long time yet. Broaddown3 when it releases will have some what you 
want and probably dearer than you want to pay.

John Adair
Enterpoint Ltd. - Home of Raggedstone1. The Low Cost Spartan-3 Development 
Board.
http://www.enterpoint.co.uk


"Brannon" <brannonking@yahoo.com> wrote in message 
news:1142524628.903506.159270@v46g2000cwv.googlegroups.com...
>I want a board with a few of the largest Spartan3e chips, a little
> SRAM, and a PCIExpress 8x slot and controller for under $300. Until
> that happens, FPGAs are not in the consumer market in my opinion. All
> the current consumer boards lack one necessary feature for general
> purpose acceleration and coprocessing: datastream bandwidth. Tinkering
> with gates (like one would do with current Digilent starter kits)
> should not be considered a consumer product; that is in the hobbiest
> arena.
>
> I've worked with the FPGAs in the military some. They use it mostly for
> image de/compression and de/encryption -- the obvious uses for them.
> Bandwidth is a huge concern on every FPGA application I've ever worked
> with, especially with the military. I just wish that thinking would
> propagate down to the consumer level. Somehow the graphics card
> companies seem to have a grip on it, while other general coprocessing
> hardware seems to have been skipped over lightly.
> 

Austin Lesea wrote:
> pd....
> 
> -snip-
> 
>> Aerospace posses issues with ionizing radiation.
> 
> Which is why we offer the QPro series, and have onging research into 
> solving all the problems in these applications.
> 

I'm surprised you didn't mention that quite a few FPGAs, including 
Xilinx FPGAs, have been roaming around the surface of Mars for the past 
two years. And while a few mechanical parts are starting to wear out, 
the FPGAs are still going strong.

In message <ifmi1218qkjo36fnvf3mk21p6n2k4mv39m@4ax.com>
          John C <brakepiston@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> Reading the LSI Strucutred ASIC fiasco thread has made me think.
> People are saying the FPGA revenues are going to grow, so....
> 
> Which markets are FPGA heading into?
> 
> I mean, at the moment there's Comms, Medical, Military, Consumer.
> 
> Where are they going next? 
> 
> Automotive I guess is coming, as is aerospace. You could put the two
> together, as control electronics. 
> 
> How about seeing them in a PC? 

See http://www.microdigital.info 

Altho the company seems to have ceased trading, there are a few of us who
have units.
It uses  Spartan xc2s200's, one to implement a northbridge and one as a
memory controller and graphic engine. A xc95144 is used to boot them and
provide memory control.
NOTE this is not a windows machine, but is a RISCOS (http://www.riscos.com)
machine with an ARM based processor.


> 
> What are your views on the matter?

-- 
webmaster@tankstage.co.uk   
Iyonix PC

Duane,

Yes!  Exciting, but not very high volume.  12 XCV1000's.  Times 2.

Austin

Duane Clark wrote:

> Austin Lesea wrote:
> 
>> pd....
>>
>> -snip-
>>
>>> Aerospace posses issues with ionizing radiation.
>>
>>
>> Which is why we offer the QPro series, and have onging research into 
>> solving all the problems in these applications.
>>
> 
> I'm surprised you didn't mention that quite a few FPGAs, including 
> Xilinx FPGAs, have been roaming around the surface of Mars for the past 
> two years. And while a few mechanical parts are starting to wear out, 
> the FPGAs are still going strong.

Austin Lesea wrote:
> John C,
> 
> Automotive is happening (big) right now.
> 
> Latest (can't say which) luxury car has 10+ Xilinx FPGAs in it.
> 
> One car.
> 
> 10+ FPGAs.
> 
> Replaced all the microcontrollers.
> 
> Why?  Because the microcontrollers can not be maintained for ten years, 
> whereas the car maker can always buy any future version of our FPGA, and 
> put their old VHDL/verilog into it.  Maintaining stock for all cars sold 
> for replacement assemblies for ten years was driving the maker broke 
> (pun intended).

?!? - I'm hoping this is just Austin's enthusiasm, because if the
Luxury Car vendor really believed this, that is truly scary.

  Would YOU drive off, in your luxury car, in 10 years time, where
they had 'just respun' the VHDL code, thru new tools, into the
newest FPGA ( _and_ assuming that newest FPGA _AND_ PCB will physically 
fit at all !? ).

  This is nothing but a lawyer's feeding trough....

-jg