Embedded Programmability (Finally) Comes of Age

By _EETimes Blog

April 6, 2017

It has been a long time coming, but eFPGA technology has finally come of age.

Decades after the concept of embedding programmability into ASIC devices was first imagined, a number of industry trends have converged to finally make it economically practical to implement. On the supply side, the most fundamental of those trends is that mask costs have gone up dramatically with each new generation of semiconductor process technology, while the cost of transistors (and thus, gates) has continued to fall. On the demand side, the emergence of the IoT market -- with its associated fragmented application space and low cost and power requirements -- has engendered a need for highly flexible devices that have a low per-unit cost and consume little power. This need has been partially met through the use of embedded processors, but their power consumption versus performance trade-off makes them a less-than-ideal solution for IoT edge applications. Let's look at each of these trends in a little more detail.

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