What are Common Uses for FPGAs?
A Field Programmable Gate array is an integrated “field-programmable” configured by the user after manufacturing. HDL or Hardware Description Language specifies the FPGA configuration. It can be programmed and it supports thousands of gates. It can prototype integrated circuit designs. After the design is set, these chips perform faster.
Here are some of the major uses of FPGA:
- Digital Signal Processing
- Software-design Radio
- Aerospace and Defense system
- ASIC Prototyping
- Medical Imaging
- Computer Vision
- Speech Recognition
- Cryptography
- Bioinformatics
- Computer Hardware Emulation
- Radio Astronomy
- Metal Detection
There are continuing growths of numbers in the uses of FPGAs. They are especially used for any kinds of algorithm that utilizes the huge parallelism provided by their architecture. One specific area for this is the code breaking of cryptographic algorithms particularly in brute-force attack.
It is also used in conventional high performance computing applications. High-performance Computing makes use of supercomputers and computer clusters, but FPGAs can do it too. Computation kernels, like FFT or Convolution, are done on the FPGA. No need to use microprocessors anymore.
The parallelism already imbedded in the logic resource of an FPGA makes considerable computational throughput. This is possible even at a low MHz Clock rates. FPGA is very flexible; it makes higher performance possible through using an increased number of parallel arithmetic units. This performance has created a new kind of processing called reconfigurable computing.
Reconfigurable computing is a kind of architecture in the computer where the flexibility of certain software is combined by processing with flexible high-speed fabrics like the FPGA. Its advantage against ordinary microprocessors is that it can make important changes to the data path itself and the control flow.
The use of the FPGAs on reconfigurable computing will depend on how complex the design of the FPGA design is. It must be more complex that the ordinary software. The turn-around times of current design tools will also tell whether or not that certain FPGA is applicable for reconfigurable computing.
Normally, the FPGA is reserved for more specific vertical applications where there are only small volumes of productions. But this is in the past, at present, there have been new cost performance dynamics that broadened the range of viable applications. These are some of the most common uses of an FPGA. As you can see FPGA is a complex system that you can use for almost any kinds of applications.