Survey points to switch from ASICs to FPGAs

Improvements in the use of traditional EDA techniques will not address the problem of shrinking windows of market opportunity, according to the findings of a new user survey.

Improvements in the use of traditional electronics design automation (EDA) techniques will not address the problem of shrinking windows of market opportunity, according to the findings of a new user survey.

Over 74% of the survey respondents indicated that that more flexible designs leveraging reconfigurable technologies were a better solution.

The report "Reconfigurable computing: a survey of user attitudes towards reprogrammable logic", compiled by Celoxica in association with Electronics Weekly, presents feedback from more than 700 design engineers across the world.

45% of the respondents were hardware designers, 12% were software engineers, 41% were both and 2% declined to indicate their field.

"Innovation has lost its meaning in the areas of embedded system design and electronic design automation through misuse.

Little has changed in the last five or more years despite the endless cries of innovation.

Our industry is in decline because of a dot.com boom that few people understood and for which even fewer could identify an immediate need.

At the same time chip manufacturers are getting squeezed against ceilings of performance that make less and less economic sense to break through.

A new direction is needed that whets the customers' appetite for technology once again.

There's a growing realisation that the combination of reprogrammable logic and high-level design techniques are opening up new horizons", said Jon Treanor, President and CEO of Celoxica.

83% of the survey's respondents stated that they plan to increase their use of FPGAs on projects, and 52% indicated that their use of ASICs would fall.

Furthermore, 44% of software engineers and 40% of hardware designers predicted a significant shift in the use of FPGAs away from glue logic, prototyping and ASIC replacement to become a platform for implementing flexible designs.

"The findings suggest that the number of new ASIC designs starts and their associated EDA tools will fall.

We do not advocate an either/or attitude towards C-based and RTL design techniques", said Dennis Nye, senior vice president, worldwide sales and marketing.

"But it is clear that traditional EDA tools are not effectively tackling some of the challenges facing design engineers.

By mixing C-based design techniques and reprogrammable hardware you combine the abundance of engineers, speed of development, flexibility and capability for infield upgrades associated with the software world with the acceleration gained by expressing functions in parallel hardware".

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