Speaker
Description
Since years Airbus Defence and Space capitalizes on the advantages of Field Programmable Gate Array Technologies and has accumulated considerable heritage and experiences with it.
The presentation will provide an overview of the application domains and the FPGA devices that address those application fields. Particular consideration will be payed towards the experiences associated with the new European FPGAs of NanoXplore and more recent and flexible reprogrammable devices. Application domains and benefits will be discussed. As all recent technologies augment significantly in complexity, in resources and functionality, new scopes and opportunities will be discussed.
Regardless the technology, all recent devices have a significant rise in complexity in common. This changes also the application of the FPGAs from a dedicated function solution to a complex system on chip (SoC) with influences on the total development approach and increase the verification effort and request the use of new more advance verification tools and methodologies.
From user point of view, the equipment complexity is inside the FPGA which integrates a large part of numeric hardware, data handling software and application software. This trend is changing the way to face new designs our market considered traditional. A fast loop co-engineering phase is necessary during the major part of the design phase to resolve the equipment complexity. The fast exchanges during co-design allow to make the trade-offs on various subjects such as power, timings, data accuracy, functional behaviour, resources utilization. From equipment designer point of view, a potential drawback is that the design is more showed up even if the design is less risked. The presentation will discuss these new challenges in development philosophy and the experience with corresponding tools and methods.
