Beyond Physical: Solving High-end FPGA Design Challenges

The advantages of using programmable logic to get electronic products to market quickly with less risk and cost are well known and recent market drivers have shifted even further in their favor; new economic realities coupled with changing consumer behavior, shorter product life cycles, richer feature sets, and faster upgrades, to name a few. In step with these demands, high-end FPGAs are now architected using geometries down to 40nm and with capacities of up to five million equivalent ASIC gates. They include performance optimized I/O’s and dedicated DSP architectures that together enable extremely powerful and cost-effective solutions. For these reasons, FPGAs are also widely used to realistically prototype and validate ASIC designs at orders of magnitude higher speeds than are possible with traditional acceleration or emulation based solutions. These FPGA-based ASIC prototypes allow you to tune and debug your design, and just as importantly, act as vehicles for early system software development while the final ASIC design is underway.