Newbie: Slow FPGAs

dave · 2005-03-17T20:12:38+00:00

I am probably opening a can of worms, but why are FPGAs so slow?The CPU cores at represent an ever growing number of excellent and very practical, but slow processor implementations. What I mean is 240-500Mhz FPGAs, when market CPUs are in the 3Ghz range.Surely there must be 1 or 2 Ghz FPGAs available with sub nano second gate switch/propagation times.Or possibly it is a verilog, vhdl or synthesis problem with the designs?Should I just use mass manufactured high speed CPUs and relegate the other discrete logic to CPLD/FPGAs??Lastly, how fast is NIOSII?

Mar 17, 2005 21 Replies

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Ray Andraka 21 years ago

There is also a cost advantage with fpgas until you get into high volumes. The fact of the matter is FPGAs are on 90nm technology now, and will compete head to head with ASIC on a 0.25 micron fab. Most ASIC starts can get away with less than bleeding edge geometries, so that will tend to lessen the gap between the performance of an FPGA vs performance of an ASIC done with the coarsest geometry that wil get the job done.

--Ray Andraka, P.E. President, the Andraka Consulting Group, Inc. 401/884-7930 Fax 401/884-7950 email ray@andraka.com http://www.andraka.com "They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin, 1759

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dave 21 years ago

Thanks. Your reply follows the general theme of others: FPGA speeds are sufficiently high, it is the design of FPGA technologies that can sometimes result in what might appear slow performance, but in fact this is the generic FPGA functionality at work.

I (inappropriately) was complaining about why "one size fits all" FPGA devices did not meet my specific requirements. Stupid now I consider it and the flames will continue to burn me for a while!!

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