What This Year May Well Bring for the eFPGA

By Geoff Tate, Flex Logix (September 15, 2023)

Over the last several years, we have seen the adoption of embedded FPGA (eFPGA) accelerating in production ASICs and SoCs. In fact, just last year we predicted that eFPGA LUTs would outship FPGA LUTs later this decade. This growth is being driven by several key factors:

• Customers are demanding performance and lower power.
• Chip development costs and design cycles continue to skyrocket.
• Designers want the ability to update SoCs over time to adapt to changing protocols, algorithms and customer needs.
• Application use cases are increasing as designers learn how to use eFPGA and see how others use it in innovative ways.

By integrating the FPGA into SoCs, ASICs and MCUs, designers now have the flexibility to make changes at any point in the chip’s life span, even in the customers’ systems.

This eliminates many expensive chip spins and enables chip designers to start addressing many customers and applications with the same chips. It also extends the life of chips and systems because designers are now able to update their chips as protocols and standards changed. In addition, while traditional FPGAs take seconds or longer to reconfigure, eFPGA allows customers to reconfigure in milliseconds or even microseconds.

We think 2023 will be another exciting year in eFPGA, and these are our top 5 predictions on what to expect:

To read the full article, click here