1984 was a good year for the electronics industry. For example, Apple introduced its now legendary Macintosh computers. It also was the year that FPGA leader Xilinx was founded. A quarter century and 10 generations of FPGAs later, Xilinx has introduced two lines of devices—the Virtex-6 and Spartan-6—that improve performance, increase design productivity, and minimize development costs.

In The Tipping Point, Malcom Gladwell describes the instant when a technology reaches the critical mass it needs to become an irresistible force on its way to some success or significant outcome. The product becomes a phenomenon that takes on a life of its own in terms of sales, popularity, and ubiquity. Moshe Gavrielov, president and CEO of Xilinx, believes that FPGAs have reached their tipping point.

“FPGAs become the prevailing silicon platform of choice for electronic manufacturers who need customization to differentiate their products,” he said. And that’s almost everyone today.

FPGAs have already found many new homes as a result of the near obsolescence of individual “glue” logic and the need for a cheaper and quicker replacement for the ASSP and ASIC. Today, larger ASSP and ASIC chips are only viable on the very highest-volume products because of their very high development cost. Larger, lower-cost FPGAs with lower power consumption have been eating away at the ASSP/ASIC space for years now.

The Programmable Imperative

Three factors are driving what Xilinx calls the programmable imperative. Market forces, financial constraints, and technological innovation now make flexibility and time-to-market key attributes for success today. Rapid consumer-driven change, hyper-connectivity, and fickle fragmented markets make it difficult to predict the need for upgrades that help ensure long product life. But the ability to change, upgrade, or reconfigure on the fly gives product developers the ultimate flexibility.

There is also a gap in the logic applications market space between those applications that clearly favor an ASIC/ASSP solution and the larger, more traditional FPGA-served areas. This gap of underserved applications can now look forward to a new way to offer programmability to meet future needs. If you’re looking for a way to address new applications in a new way, FPGAs may be the right choice as they can decrease development time and cost while giving you a way to differentiate your product.

Differentiate or Die

That is the basic message of Xilinx’s new products. Most products these days are standards-driven, so functionality and performance are mostly predetermined. Yet there is always room to offer features or benefits that sway the customer your way. Embedded controllers and cores help. But more and more, the FPGA provides the programmability and higher performance demanded by some applications. Anything with DSP is a good example.

Brent Przybus, director of product marketing at Xilinx, sees seven key growth opportunities for FPGAs and Xilinx:

• Improved picture quality of flat-panel displays
• 
  Next-generation automotive infotainment
• 
  Improved security through real-time image interpretation
• 
  Environmentally friendly wireless basestations
• 
  The demand for bandwidth in the wired infrastructure
• 
  A common secure communications platform
• 
  Flexible, dynamic high-resolution video and audio

FPGAs that offer benefits in price, power consumption, performance, density, features, and programmability can meet these opportunities. In addition, engineers need better tools, methodologies, and IP so FPGAs can deliver on their promise of fast time-to-market and flexibility. Xilinx’s Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 FPGAs provide what is needed for these opportunities. The Xilinx targeted design platform strategy encompasses the integration of five key elements:

• New Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 FPGAs
• 
  Design environments supporting and integrating industry-proven methodologies
• 
  Scalable boards and kits adopting the industry-standard FPGA Mezzanine Connector
• 
  Socketable IP cores
• 
  Robust reference designs