Industry Articles
CPUs in FPGAs: many faces to a trend-March 7, 2011 |
Whether as synthesizable soft cores or hard cores on the die, CPUs are showing up in more FPGA designs, bringing with them important challenges for designers.
Ron Wilson, Editorial Director -- EDN, March 3, 2011
CPU cores in FPGAs have a history reaching back to the early years of the FPGA’s existence and a future extending far into the realms of microcontrollers and ASSPs (application-specific standard products). We are now at an inflection point in that trajectory, facing manifold options. CPU cores may be soft—synthesizable cores that go into the FPGA’s programmable logic—or hard—cell-based blocks that the FPGA vendor builds directly onto the die. The CPU architecture may be industry-standard, proprietary to the FPGA vendor, or unique. Processing capability spans tiny 8-bit microcontroller cores and 32-bit CPU clusters with DSP extensions. All this diversity conceals profound differences in implementation flow, in system performance, and in debugging access, all of which demand exploration.