The main factor in replacing ASIC with FPGA chip is power consumption

FPGA, Chinese means field programmable gate array, developed on the basis of several other programmable devices, such as PAL, GAL, CPLD, as a semi-custom circuit in the field of ASIC (application specific integrated circuit), it not only solves the shortcomings of the custom circuit, but also overcomes the shortcomings of the original programmable gate device circuit. Although it has better reasons than ASIC, it can't replace ASIC. The main reason is power consumption. For example, it is used on smart phones, and the chip of FPGA makes the battery life of lithium battery weaker.

If you want to understand the FPGA more intuitively, you can give a case.

In the personal computer field, British and American researchers developed a central processor in December 2010 that effectively integrates 1,000 cores on an FPGA chip, making microchips like millions of transistors, and transistors are Any basic part of the circuit. FPGA is actually a semi-finished product relative to ASIC. It can be installed by users on a specific circuit. Their functions are not set at the factory. In this way, users can divide transistors into one "small department". Each "small department" is required to complete different tasks.

Because FPGA needs to adapt to more product designs, its necessary configuration is actually more, so the power consumption is naturally much larger. Therefore, realizing fast operation, reducing power consumption and cost, optimizing clock management, and reducing the complexity of FPGA's parallel design with the current wide range of PCB are the key issues for FPGA system design consideration. Large capacity, high speed and low power consumption have become the focus of FPGA development.

First, large capacity. Capacity is the most basic technical parameter of FPGA. Just as nickel-metal hydride batteries and lithium batteries require capacity, larger capacity means more new areas of FPGA development. Therefore, each time the new process chip is released, it means increasing the chip capacity, using lithium batteries as an example, from the earliest replacement of nickel-metal hydride batteries for portable appliances, to the later emergence of vehicle-powered lithium batteries due to increased capacity. With the development of technology, Larger capacity lithium-ion batteries for smart power plant energy storage systems are also increasingly being promoted in this field.

Second, the high rate. Many of today's multimedia product technology bottlenecks are characterized by slow speeds, "card" machines, and even worse, crashes. This is a data system problem, that is, bandwidth. In order to promote the wider application of FPGAs, current popular FPGAs can provide various high-speed buses. In order to solve the problem of high-speed data transmission, FPGA provides high-speed serial I/O(bandwidth), which provides flexibility for high-speed transmission of different standards.

Third, low power consumption. With the development trend of electronic product compatibility becoming more obvious, power consumption has become an issue that must be considered in the development of electronic products because FPGAs set more compatibility and therefore consume more power. In addition, electronic products themselves require greater power consumption. This superimposed power consumption makes FPGAs unable to replace professional ASICs. Further, all battery-powered handheld applications can not directly use FPGAs. For example, the iPhone 4, which requires a large-capacity lithium battery, is obviously not suitable for using a high-power FPGA chip in the face of a single charge that can not be used for a day.

As stated at the beginning of the article, FPGA chips have gradually become the core of many application systems. In the face of rapid development, FPGAs need to have stronger dynamic programming capabilities to accommodate ever-improving protocol systems and continuously proposed platform optimization requirements.

These can be summarized as four elements: large(capacity), high(rate), low(power consumption), and strong(dynamic), while low power consumption is the support and supplement of the other three elements.

The page contains the contents of the machine translation.