FPGA programmable logic has served in many capacities since it was introduced back in the early 80’s. Recently, with designers looking for innovative ways to boost system performance, FPGA’s have moved front and center. This initiative has taken on new urgency with the slowing down of process node based performance gains. The search has moved to new algorithmic and architectural innovations that can push performance forward to meet the needs of big data, cloud computing, mobile, networking and other domains.
The new applications for FPGA’s are a far cry from the glue-logic uses that they first fulfilled. FPGA’s have been moving up the semiconductor food chain for some time though. They were applied to networking applications by Cisco and others back in the 90’s – as they entered their second decade. Most recently a major shift occurred when FPGA’s were paired with CPU’s to facilitate compute intensive operations. FPGA’s cannot adapt to new tasks as quickly as a general-purpose CPU, but they excel at repetitive operations that involve high throughput.