For decades, embedded FPGA (eFPGA) technology has appeared in various forms in the industry. For us, eFPGA is no longer a new term. However, recently, eFPGA technology has suddenly attracted people's attention. Why? Perhaps this is due to the convergence of two basic economic trends within the semiconductor industry.
At present, the device design is more and more complex, and the actualization of SoC design (involving software tools, engineering time-consuming and mold making costs, etc.) is also becoming more and more complex. As the technology of generations has been updated, the development cost has also risen sharply.
On the contrary, the unit function cost of device devices has been decreasing. For example, 20 or 30 years ago, FPGAs were still relatively expensive. If FPGAs were added to the design of ASICs, the overall size and complexity of the ASIC's overall die would often increase, and the cost of such hybrid equipment would be too high to be practical. Therefore, people are more inclined to use FPGA devices for prototyping and pre-production designs than for mass production applications. However, this situation has ceased to exist today.
SoC designs are numerous and costly. As a result, the risk of no corresponding products meeting specific market needs is greatly increased, while the cost of FPGAs is lower and the applications are more flexible. If eFPGA is used for product design, market risks will be reduced and economic benefits will also be reduced. Promote.
The Advantages of eFPGA Technology However, eFPGA technology not only overcomes the problems caused by these two key economic trends, it is designed based on this technology, and there are other hidden advantages. For example, installing eFPGA IP and other functional modules on a silicon chip of an SoC at the same time, the overall design will achieve low power consumption, low latency, and high bandwidth. Compared to ASIC+ FPGA solutions, ASIC solutions with eFPGA modules have lower power consumption, better performance, lower cost, and smaller size while still maintaining design flexibility.
The advantage of eFPGA technology lies in its characteristic - the reprogrammable characteristic of eFPGA. This feature makes it easy for design engineers to update SoCs in an environment where market demand is constantly changing. As a result, products designed by them can occupy the market for a longer period of time, and profits, revenue, and profitability will increase substantially. SoCs with eFPGA installed are highly efficient, not only able to quickly update and upgrade to support new interface standards, but also add new features to quickly respond to emerging competitive threats, and also enable a series of product variants to meet the needs of market segments. Maximize cost efficiency. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a typical example of using this kind of Soc.
In addition, using eFPGA technology in SoC design can reduce overall power consumption while improving overall design performance. Some features in the SoC design tend to "eat" the flexibility of the processor, but these features can have higher performance and higher efficiency in the FPGA logic. And, with the reprogrammability features of most eFPGA technologies, design engineers can create hardware-based solutions and reconfigure solutions for specific problems, which further improves design performance and reduces power consumption.
Applications of eFPGA Technology in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), Security, and Other Applications SoC has applications in many areas. The addition of eFPGA technology has only given it a few more application cases. However, in some areas, compared to traditional SoC solutions, SoCs using eFPGA technology have very significant advantages.
We analyzed sensor processing, in which the eFPGA in the EOS S3 SoC implements fast sensor algorithms and interface updates without the need to design a new version of the device. Voice processing related to artificial intelligence (AI) based on cloud data will be another major development of human-computer interaction. In the future, new triggers can be quickly and easily added to systems that support "smart speaker" products (such as Amazon's Alexa). word.
The highly fragmented Internet of Things (IoT) market is also a good demonstration of the substantial benefits that eFPGA technology can deliver. The Internet of Things (IoT) market is very large, but few applications can attract a lot of market demand. It is no wonder that SoC engineers will use a platform-based approach that will allow them to leverage all of the common functions of each application, use eFPGA technology, and design a large number of product variants to meet specific market needs. Or to solve the emerging applications, there is no additional time and cost to redesign the ASIC. The entire process is very fast and economical.
In general, machine learning can take advantage of the reconfigurable nature of eFPGA. Because the hardware in the eFPGA module can be configured and reconfigured at any time, when the computer encounters some extremely complex problems, using eFPGA technology can be solved cost-effectively.
eFPGA also plays a major role in the security field. Nowadays, new security breaches or violations will happen from time to time, and once they are not resolved, they will be very dangerous. The security algorithm is based on hardware and needs to be constantly updated. The eFPGA hardware in the SoC can be updated and upgraded, and new defense solutions can be provided at any time.
The Future of eFPGA Technology Given the trends in the industry and the unit cost trend, the SoC design team will adopt more eFPGA technology and eFPGA IP will shine brightly. However, eFPGA, like all complex technologies, faces challenges. The architecture, size, and technology of eFPGA IP are all different. There are thousands of results in any combination. In addition, there are certain differences in the formation of SoCs in different foundries and process nodes. Therefore, eFPGA is used to create one for all. Products that meet all market requirements are not possible. In addition, due to different requirements for metal layers, different clock domain settings, and various power management mechanisms, hidden integration issues may also occur.
Although eFPGA technology has taken many forms, the market is still in the transition from the early trial period to the mainstream use period. In the short term, this trend will only accelerate. The eFPGA application cases and terminal products have become more and more common, ranging from mobile devices, listening and wearable devices, wearable devices, to Internet of Things (IoT), big data, communication centers, reconfigurable computing platforms, and cloud-based Artificial intelligence (AI) and so on.
However, the eFPGA technology will only succeed if the programmable logic is efficiently integrated within the SoC. When technology, architecture, and software tools are properly combined, the development team will create a complete and effective design process that can be used to transform concepts into actual, market-oriented products.
(Amelia Compilation)
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