[UFO Chicago] Meeting Followup--FPGAs

[Matthew T. Gibbs]

______________________________
> From: Neil R. Ormos <ormos at ripco.com>
>To: UFO Chicago Mailing List <ufo at ufo.chicago.il.us> 
>Sent: Monday, December 12, 2016 2:29 PM
>Subject: [UFO Chicago] Meeting Followup--FPGAs
> 
>
>At last night's UFO meeting, we discussed the new
>Stratix 10 line of high-end field-programmable
>gate arrays (FPGAs) from Altera (now Intel). One
>question asked was (paraphrased) "What sort of
>design problem would require an FPGA?"
>
>An example of an inexpensive digital TV
>transmitter system that uses an FPGA is described
>here:
>
>  <https://datv-express.com/uploads/TechTalk109-DATV.pdf>
>
>The transmitter accepts a formatted video data
>stream from a separate computer via a USB port,
>and performs modulation and filtering according to
>one of the supported digital TV standards. The
>FPGA is used because a general-purpose CPU would
>be too slow, or, if a fast enough CPU were
>available, it would be much more expensive. Over
>time, the developers have moved some additional
>workload from the separate computer into the FPGA.
>
>The FPGA used in the transmitter is a (now) cheap,
>low-end FPGA in Altera's Cyclone II product line.
>The table below superficially compares that FPGA
>with a high-end member of the Stratix V product
>line and mid-range member of the new Stratix 10
>product line (at least, it's shown on Altera's
>roadmap):
>
>  Brand             LE   Blocks    Price
>  -----------  -------   ------   ------
>  Cyclone II:     8256      516      $22
>  Stratix V:    622000   234720    $8900
>  Stratix 10:  2005000   679680        ?
>
>The "LE" column refers to the number of "logic
>elements" provided in the FPGA. A logic element is
>the smallest user-accessible logic unit available
>in the FPGA, and is typically a flip-flop or
>simple gate.  The LEs are organized into groups or
>"blocks" containing a relatively small number of
>LEs.  The "Blocks" column refers to the number of
>these available in the FPGA.  Connections between
>LEs within a block are more numerous, cheaper, and
>faster, than those crossing block
>boundaries. Where possible, the toolchain that
>converts the designer's representation of the
>design into the data used to program the FPGA
>assigns the LEs used to implement related logic
>from the same block.


Very interesting.  Thank you for the additional info!

Matt