Future Trends and Applications

Abstract

Application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) have enabled the dramatic increase in computational power that digital systems have enjoyed over the past 20 years; however, within the past 5 years, the cost associated with designing and fabricating an ASIC has increased considerably [40]. This cost stems from the increased complexity of the design process, along with the high cost of manufacturing that accompanies modern fabrication processes. As a consequence, there has been a marked reduction in the number of ASIC design starts per year compared to design starts 10 years ago. At the same time, Field ProgrammableGate Arrays (FPGAs) have gained a foothold as one of the most-used building blocks in digital systems. The flexibility of an FPGA allows designers to reduce hardware design cycles times, while adding inherent feature upgradeability in the final product. Traditionally FPGAs have been used solely as a prototyping vehicle due to their higher cost and slower performance compared to ASICs; however, recently FPGAs have experienced a dramatic increase in performance due to the rapid improvement in IC processing technology.