Re: Is FPGA code called gateware?

<fpga_toys@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:1140727198.395726.97600@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


and low level hardware design is soon to be long gone for all the
same reasons of labor cost vs. hardware cost.
Where price, performance and power consumption don't matter a higher
level language might become more prevalent.

The power argument is moot, as the difference between power for a good
C coder and a good asm coder, is probably less than a fraction of a
percent.

I was talking about the FPGA domain here, not SW.


I also wonder if price/performance/power consumption will become much
less important in the future, as it has with software. These days
you can assume application software will be run on a 'standard'
sufficiently powerful PC. It won't be the case that at the start of
every hardware project that you can assume you have a multi million
gate FPGA (or whatever) at your disposal.

Today, the price difference between low end FPGA boards and million
gate boards is getting pretty small, with megagate FPGAs in high
volume. Five, or even two years ago, was pretty different.

Not every design has the need for million gate device functionality,
Altera and Xilinx's low cost families seem to be selling in big
numbers. Sometimes it's important to push the performance of these
lower cost devices to keep costs down. Getting the same functionality
into a smaller device can also be important if power consumtion is
critical (my original point).

How many power supplies do you need for your big devices?

The Google description for this group is: Field Programmable Gate Array
based computing systems, under Computer Architecture FPGA. And, after
a few years, I think we are finally getting there .... FPGA based
coputing instead of CPU based computing.

This newsgroup and FPGAs were around long before some numpty at Google
decided what their description should be. I don't think we should
be taking this as a guiding pointer for the future.


The days of FPGA's being only for hardware design are slipping away.
While this group has been dominated by hardware designers using FPGA's
for hardware designs, I suspect that we will see more and more
engineers of all kinds here doing computing on FPGA's, at all levels.

That's probably true, and I expect to be using other tools as well as
VHDL in 5 years. However as John posted above, there's alot more to
implementing an FPGA design than the description used for the logic
and I think we'll still be using HDLs to get the most out of them for
a long time to come (to a bigger extent than with C/asm).



Nial.


.

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