FPGA Gurus

I always try to follow what the irrepressible David Manners has to say about the electronics industry, and his July 10 posting in Electronics Weekly is no exception. Manners quotes Xilinx’s Brent Przybus on the impact of the Targeted Design Platform on the neophyte system designer. Then he follows it up with a discussion of XMOS steering C programmers to the use of a programmable control architecture for prototyping designs.

Now, is Manners talking about two dissimilar prototyping tools as a means of showing how the barriers to entry for good designs have fallen? Or is he identifying two different paths to programmability and prototyping that soon may converge more than some people anticipate? Good question! When I saw Atmel Corp. re-target its programmable efforts from FPGAs to pre-defined controllers, the first thing I thought was, “What if the likes of Microchip or Freescale start hitting the market with what might be called sorta-FPGAs?” Will they spell the death of traditional microcontrollers? Will they make the likes of Xilinx and Altera sit up and take notice? Or will it be simply another arrow in the programmable quiver, of no huge consequence to existing MCU or FPGA designs?

Maybe Manners was crazy to juxtapose Xilinx TDPs and XMOS XS1-L. Or maybe he was crazy like a fox.