FPGA vs others devices, CPLD/MCU/MP - GENERA Technologies
FPGA vs others devices, CPLD/MCU/MP
BLOG > Programmable Logic
TRADE-OFF FPGA vs CPLD/MCU/MP
One of the fundamental decisions when designing an electronic product is the choice of the electronic device to use, since this will affect variables such as the cost of said product, its performance, its design method, etc. This decision should be made early in the design process.
When choosing between the different integrated circuits, various aspects must be taken into account, such as the speed at which the device is to work, the amount of logic resources to be used, the design and manufacturing costs, the number of units to produce or whether the device will need to be reprogrammed or not, and the environment where the chip will run (ground segment, temperatures, defense, space, LEO, GEO...).
To choose an FPGA over other integrated circuits, its advantages over these must be taken into account.
FPGA vs CPLD:
- An FPGA has a higher density of logic than CPLDs.
- The FPGA has a lower price per unit of logic, although the price per integrated circuit is higher.
- Because an FPGA has a greater amount of logic, FPGAs allow you to design much more complex systems than a CPLD.
- FPGAs have embedded circuits optimized to perform arithmetic operations, such as counters, adders, multipliers, IP hard, etc, while CPLD do not implement this functions.
FPGA vs MCU/MP (micro-controller, multi-processor):
- An FPGA can perform massive arimetic-logical operations per clock cycle while a MCU/MP can only execute a single instruction per core/processor.
- An FPGA can execute operations concurrently, thus increasing the speed of data processing without parallel to any mcu or processor.
- An FPGA can be reprogrammed to completely change its functionality, while a microcontroller is programmable but has a static circuitry and instruction set oriented to specific arithmetic-logical applications.
- MCU/MP-based application development time is shorter than FPGA/ASIC development, however FPGA-based application designs are more transparent, deterministic and safety than applications running over third applications such as operative systems (OS) running on processor.
Depending on the set of needs of each application, a decision must be made between an FPGA or another of the integrated circuits available on the market. And inside FPGA technology field, also we have several FPGA technologies to be considered in functions of our end application.
MPSoC and FPGA-based implementations and developments are not an easy task, and you may not always have the experience, resources, or time to fulfill your planning.
Our team of engineers specialized in FPGAs and SoC / MPSoC offers you experience and services to develop your product, with the mission of helping you reduce your development cycles. At GENERA Technologies we have a long history helping our clients to convert the signal acquired by the sensor into processed, reliabilted and real-time information in the shortest latency in a wide range of applications. Contact us.
