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by jason mcdonald, senior editor | read other blog posts

FPGA vendors like leaders Xilinx and Altera have long sought to engage the embedded systems community but had more success at working one-by-one with ASIC designs migrating down to programmable logic. Perhaps Fall, 2010, is the season in which we will finally see a conceptual break out by either (or both); witness Altera's newest push into embedded systems. In this month's newsletter we overview Xilinx, Altera, and FPGAs for embedded.

contents of this post:

1. Altera's Embedded Initiative and the Many Uses of FPGAs in Embedded
2. Altera's Push Into Embedded Systems
3. Xilinx FPGAs and Embedded Systems
4. feedback - read it
5. feedback - give it

Altera's Embedded Initiative and the Many Uses of FPGAs in Embedded

On October 12th, Altera announced its Embedded Initiative. With this initiative, Altera hopes to provide designers a single FPGA design flow based on its Quartus® II development software—including the new Qsys system-level integration tool, a common FPGA intellectual property (IP) library, and new ARM® Cortex™-A9 MPCore™ and MIPS® Technologies MIPS32 embedded processor offerings. This is a new, significant push into embedded systems by Altera, and the synergies with competing architectures ARM and MIPS makes it all the more intriguing...

But before plunging into the Xilinx vs. Altera debate, let's identify some major ways that FPGAs can be used -

• FPGAs for ASIC prototyping - many FPGAs are actually used for test, or small run, deployments and then if the market supports it, the product is transitioned to an ASIC.
• FPGAs can be used indirectly, when using a vendor like Pentek ( http://www.pentek.com ) or Bittware ( http://www.bittware.com ) who specializes in FPGA-based high performance boards.
• FPGAs can be used in a semi-configurable fashion as in deployments using National Instruments CompactRIO format

To be honest, the two big vendors - Altera and Xilinx - have traditionally gone after the larger deployments, and left the embedded systems designer to fend for him or herself, with less than perfect support. Yet FPGAs can be complex and this lack of one-on-one support has been a big barrier to adoption. Board vendors like Pentek or Bittware, as well as larger enterprises like National Instruments have picked up the slack, by helping with either a fully functional FPGA-based board or at least a configurable one.

Is the day coming when FPGA technology will truly penetrate embedded systems? Let's investigate the most important resources of the big two: Altera and Xilinx, as well as their news.

Altera's Push Into Embedded Systems

Altera, like Xilinx, has long had its eye on the large total volume of embedded systems designs, but been stymied by the market fragmentation and the fact that each design has its own unique issues and complexities. Its new Embedded Initiative hopes to address these issues.

"The combination of FPGAs and processors is rapidly expanding to create new levels of customization in embedded systems design," said Vince Hu, vice president of product and corporate marketing, Altera Corporation. "With the Embedded Initiative, Altera is enabling designers in markets such as automotive, industrial, military and wireless to easily leverage a rich ecosystem of processor, operating system and IP support all through a single design flow, and to reduce overall system cost, achieve faster time to market and increase the flexibility of their systems."

Read the full announcement, here , and the Embedded Initiative home page, here .

Among other Altera resources for embedded systems designers interested in FPGA technology, don't miss their primary embedded systems information page , and their informative Youtube Channel . The synergies between FPGAs and MIPS / ARM are intriguing - might one see convergence between FPGA and Embedded on the horizon? We hope so.

Xilinx FPGAs and Embedded Systems

Like Altera, Xilinx has a dedicated web portal to embedded systems ( here ) meant to be a one stop shop for any embedded systems designer thinking of checking out Xilinx FPGA technology. That said, Xilinx has also suffered from an approach / avoidance reaction to embedded systems. It approaches the embedded systems market because of its large total volume, but then avoids it as the fragmentation and the heavy needs of embedded designers befuddles a company that is more comfortable with Tier-1 vendors migrating down from ASICs.

Nevertheless, the company has invested heavily in online education with some of the best FPGA learning sites on the Internet -

• Xilinx Learning and Training Center
• What is Programmable Logic ?
• Getting Started with FPGAs

Beyond its own website, the company has a robust, Youtube Channel on FPGAs . In recent news, it - too - is supporting the growing ARM architecture. At the April, 2010, Embedded Systems Conference, for example, it announced its Extensible Processing Platform based on ARM.

Stay current on FPGAs in embedded systems by following it all via eg3.com 's FPGA coverage at http://www.eg3.com/fpga .

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