Onwards and upwards [field programmable gate arrays]

This paper discusses the future of field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) from the viewpoint of Ivo Bolsens, chief technology officer at Xilinx. Bolsens believes that the best design features for dealing with the effects of Moore´s Law and submicron devices are all in FPGAs. These devices also have a number of built-in advantages when it comes to programmability. Inherent parallelism keeps clock rate down in the MHz range, and transistor counts can be contained by dynamically reconfiguring parts of a circuit. To address the issue of Moore´s Law in FPGA design, Bolsens thinks the answer lies in moving up the abstraction level and exploiting FPGA´s inherent reprogrammability to simplify the whole design experience.