FPGA’s Entering the Era of All Programmable SoCs
Global consumer markets continue to drive the need for ubiquitous computing and an insatiable thirst for communications bandwidth, which are fuelling the growth of the electronics industry. Yet the cost of building custom SoCs to support many of the emerging applications is becoming increasingly difficult to justify- except for the highest volume devices.
FPGAs provide an attractive alternative today since they eliminate much of the NRE cost and offer tremendous flexibility to adapt to global markets; but density, power and unit cost restrictions have limited the applicability of FPGAs to infrastructure and other relatively low volume applications.
Rising to this challenge a new class of "All Programmable SoCs" is emerging that combines many of the strengths of custom SoCs and FPGAs in a single device. In this session we will discuss the different approaches underway in the industry, including embedded processing subsystems, 3D interconnect technology, SiP and others, and how they will reshape the device landscape over the next decade.