FPGAs come of age
Programmable logic devices have a range of aliases, but whatever you call them, the technology is moving ever closer to the heart of system design.
And fpgas are at the 'bleeding edge' of process technology: Xilinx is working on multidie fpgas, Altera is set to offer ARM Cortex-A9 processors in its forthcoming parts and Achronix has just sealed a deal under which it will manufacture parts on Intel's 22nm process.
It's taken a while, but the vision expressed by fpga companies a decade ago that the technology would enable programmable SoCs is now becoming reality. Long gone are the days when a pld was used to provide a bit of glue logic or a fix for a design flaw.