FPGAs: Hard And Soft Processors

Altera, Lattice Semiconductor, and Xilinx offer a wide range of FPGAs suitable for hosting both a soft processor core and high-speed interfaces such as HyperTransport, PCI Express, and Serial RapidIO. In fact, FGPAs were the testbed for every seri

William G. Wong

July 21, 2005

Today's FPGAs are designed to incorporate this type of interface intellectual property (IP). The FPGA interface ports include high-speed SERDES, simplifying the IP necessary to support the interface. FPGAs lead the pack in speed, allowing for their quick placement into new standards as they move from the 2.5-Gbit/s range to twice that for the next level.

Xilinx Virtex-II Pro and Virtex-4 FX feature one or more hard PowerPC cores within the FPGA. This essentially puts the FPGAs on par with MCUs that support high-speed interfaces. That's because the interfaces typically take up a fraction of the FPGA, leaving plenty of room for additional custom IP.

About the Author

William G. Wong

Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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