“Even engineers who spent a year or more with a microcontroller did not find FPGAs easy to use,” added Warren Miller, CEO of Wavefront Marketing, a consultant to the semiconductor industry. In many cases, it didn’t matter if users were degreed electrical engineers, experts said. “Not so long ago, we’d talk to customers, and they would like the idea of FPGA flexibility, but they were scared to death by the programming,” Jensen recalled. As such, they’ve long offered advantages for designers, including the ability to quickly implement new concepts and boost computational performance.īut since bursting on the electronics scene about three decades ago, they’ve also gained a reputation for being finicky. As the name suggests, FPGAs are made up of logic blocks that can be configured by the customer or engineer, even after manufacturing has begun. That’s always been true of FPGAs, of course. And they don’t need to create their own ASICs.” “The FPGA can be a great deployment target because it allows them to prototype their concepts. “Some of these projects use really complex non-linear control algorithms, so the developers have to use FPGAs to get the performance they need,” noted Ray Hsu, a section manager for academic programs at National Instruments. They’re building an unusual assortment of mechanized devices – from self-balancing bicycles to robots that run like cheetahs – and they’re using FPGAs for intelligence. Others are students – electrical and mechanical engineers alike – learning the technology while they complete a senior project or master’s thesis.
Some of the new makers are night owls, breathing life into their ideas when they return from their nine-to-five engineering jobs. The result is an odd convergence: a new class of makers, maybe not formally educated in FPGA programming, but smart enough to apply the new breed of simpler development kits in ways that no one has up to now. And they see that they can use FPGAs to build programmable robots and drones, then get crowd source funding, and create their own grassroots businesses out of it.”
#Diligent boards fpga software#
“We’re seeing professional engineers - graduates with master’s degrees and four or five years experience in industry,” Mark Jensen, corporate software strategy and marketing director for Xilinx, Inc., told Design News. Trenz Electronic offers a low-cost development board called ZynqBerry that features a Xilinx Zynq-7010 FPGA in a Raspberry Pi form factor. New development kits and boards are rolling out, simplifying the complex FPGA programming process and attracting a more technically literate class of “makers.” Increasingly, suppliers are marketing devices and software to make the FPGA’s tricky implementation more accessible to the masses. The powerful but complex field programmable gate array (FPGA), long considered a tool for the technical elite, is unexpectedly finding new popularity in the non-elite world of the maker community.
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