The natives will be restless in 2008
Posted by Chris Schalick on Sat, Dec 29, 2007 @ 09:45 PM
One thing is for sure, FPGAs are not getting any smaller. The latest offerings from Xilinx and Altera have enough capacity to hold a Pentium processor - not a model or stripped down version, but the actual RTL for the Pentium. Obviously this is hard to show without the code for the Pentium, but my money says a modern FPGA version of the Pentium would run faster than the released devices at 60 mhz.
Think about the complexity that a design like that implies - development at Intel is no joke! By the time they released the Pentium, they had enough market and momentum to buy every design tool known to man. We're talking about multi-million dollar emulation, simulation, modeling and prototyping systems. And the devices they released still had errata.
So now you've got the ability to develop one of these devices with an off the shelf PC, and software from the FPGA vendor. You can synthesize, place and route and program the device from your desktop with your new Pentium design. With all that capability, I'm looking for an explosion of opportunity in the development and debug space in 2008.