eFPGAs Bring a 10X Advantage in Power and Cost

By Flex Logix Technologies

eFPGA LUTs will out ship FPGA LUTs by the end of the century because of the advantages of reconfigurable logic being built into the chip: cost reduction, lower power and improved performance.

Many systems use FPGAs because they are more efficient than processors for parallel processing and can be programmed with application specific co-processors or accelerators typically found in datacenters, wireless base stations and enterprise storage.

The need for improved processing in the cloud is driven by faster search results which drives revenue. FPGAs provide very valuable programmability in these systems but customers would like to find a way to reduce the power and size to increase compute density. The way to achieve this is to integrate the FPGA into the companion SoC.

Why? Because it saves power and cost by as much as 10X. The 10X in cost reduction does not even include the saving from inventory reduction and testing when there is an extra chip on the board. For example, integrating the FPGA can reduce costs from $300 down to 20$ of additional silicon cost and the power similarly.

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