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Three Reasons to Use FPGAs in Industrial Designs Slide 7
Systems partitioned across several discrete components and boards add design complexity and cost. This is an area where using an FPGA can be advantageous. The user can integrate a design into a single FPGA platform, boosting system performance through hardware accelerators in the FPGA and enabling the design to change with evolving standards and system requirements. It is also possible to replace the primary MCU or DSP control functions with the same FPGA that was the co-processor. This saves on space and cost. Users can leverage their operating system, board support package, and C-code algorithm expertise by porting from the MCU or DSP device to the embedded processor or processors that designers can use within the FPGA. In addition, features can be integrated such as digital motor encoders, some only available as IP on FPGAs, as well as PWM controls, A/D interfaces, and custom MACs to support specific features like Industrial Ethernet protocol standards, and other custom logic. The FPGA can be used to design a SoC solution. Simply add the PHY and other analog/power components to complete the design. By using a single platform for multiple products, it is possible to realize significant time to market advantages, because there will be that much less hardware to develop and more streamlined software to support. The FPGA becomes the SoC instead of a co-processor.
PTM Published on: 2011-09-08