Will tablets offer role for FPGAs?

I dreaded even writing this post this weekend, as it provides solace to the belief that because Apple has sanctified the tablet form-factor with its iPad, that all netbooks, smartbooks, and even smartphones might as well just roll over and play dead. But with the iPad gracing the cover of Time and Wired this week, it’s becoming difficult to ignore.

Now, assuming that the iPad does not grab 100 percent market share for computers in its size and weight class, the assumption has been that the custom PA Semi processor known as the A4 used by Apple might be supplemented by ARM-based devices offered by semiconductor vendors who already have offered tablet reference designs – notably, Freescale Semiconductor with its i.MX-based system, and Marvell Semiconductor with Armada.

But PC World is suggesting that Asian OEMs and ODMs who are using ARM cores and Google OS’s (either Android or Chrome), might be willing to look at FPGAs with ARM cores at the center of such handheld tablets. The advantage, at least in the short term, is that an FPGA might be able to integrate an ARM and baseband functions alongside particular communication and serial video interfaces. But I’m not so sure that aggressive efforts by Freescale, Marvell, Qualcomm, Nvidia, and Broadcom, might relegate an FPGA-based ARM solution to a relative backwater in the tablet world.

And as I opined this week in Smartbook Blog, I’m also not so sure a handheld world centered around iPad and its clones would be preferable over one in which a hundred form factors bloomed. But that’s another story (rant) …