May 15, 2009 -- As process technology continues to improve, device sizes shrink, and designers pack more onto silicon real estate, FPGAs increasingly find themselves the center of attention. FPGA differentiation as measured by flexibility and time to market is finding new applications and responsibilities.
The shift toward portability and power-conscious electronics has led to the demand for low-power components of every variety, and now that includes FPGAs. Today power is a more important design consideration than performance. For some vendors this has meant offering incrementally lower-power devices, with next-generation devices being 60% lower power than previous generations.
By Christian Plante. (Plante is Director of Marketing low-power and mixed-signal FPGAs, Actel Corp.)
This brief introduction has been excerpted from the original copyrighted article.