The era of reprogrammable hardware is upon us. And it’s quietly becoming big business. To keep you up to date on this hot high-tech movement, the Trends research staff has ferreted out the latest developments in this revolutionary field.
With traditional computing chips, the tedious process of design and fabrication can take months or even years. And once it’s done, that chip can never do anything other than what it was designed to do. Moreover, because it’s expected to perform so many different applications, it is wasteful in its use of power. Most people will never use much of its potential.
In essence, programmable hardware completely changes the game of chip design and manufacturing and further blurs the line between hardware and software, according to an article in the January 31, 2005, issue of Linux Journal.1 Programmable logic devices, known as PLDs, are essentially generic chips that are like a blank slate on which an engineer can write his own parameters, tailored to a specific application. If the application changes, the chip can be reprogrammed in a fraction of a second to perform the new functions.
Based on rewritable memory technologies, such as SRAM, they can be reprogrammed on the fly, even after they’re shipped and are in the customer’s hand.
When Intel shipped a flawed Pentium chip a few years ago, the company stumbled badly, first by trying to minimize the severity of the problem and then by having to replace millions of chips anyway. With PLDs, a company in such a fix might simply post a few lines of code on its Web site to fix the problem.
That’s one reason why programmable logic chips are poised right now to overtake traditional, or fixed logic, chips. The former make up a $3.5 billion business right now, while the market for fixed-logic chips is about four times that size. But PLDs are rapidly catching up. Their sales growth has outpaced that of fixed logic for several years, and the newest PLDs are now stealing market share from the traditional vendors.
In addition to their ability to fix problems, even after shipment, there are a number of other reasons for this trend toward reconfigurable computing:
First, PLDs cut time-to-market for new generations of existing products from...
