Before talking about FPGA, let's talk about the issue of ZTE being sanctioned.
Former U.S. President Trump once issued a ban, because ZTE violated a certain U.S. regulation, prohibiting any foreign company in the U.S. from selling FPGA chips to ZTE.
At this time, there will definitely be young people who say, I have seen domestically produced FPGA chips, and I have used them. [Usually when encountering this type of questioning voice, I usually say: You are right! 】
Later, ZTE had no choice but to compromise. The United States sent people to ZTE and signed some agreements. Finally, the original business relationship was restored.
You must know that the combination of the capabilities of CPU, GPU, and FPGA is the future of chips!
The FPGA threshold is unmatched in the chip industry.
FPGA is a technology-intensive industry. Without a solid technical foundation, it is difficult to produce competitive products.
Well, let's introduce what an FPGA is!
FPGA is a hardware reconfigurable architecture. Its full English name is Field Programmable Gate Array , and its Chinese name is Field Programmable Gate Array .
FPGA is a chip that can be programmed to change the internal structure. FPGA has been used as a small-batch substitute for special-purpose chips (ASIC) for many years.
At the same time, it is also deployed on a large scale in the data centers of companies such as Microsoft and Baidu to provide powerful computing power and sufficient flexibility at the same time.
Before there is no FPGA, in order to realize the design idea of a new computer architecture,
It is necessary to develop an ASIC as a prototype and mount many bulky ICs on the panel.
However, unlike these methods that require a huge investment of cost and effort, once users create a prototype board with multiple FPGAs, they can immediately run the new architecture you designed.
What's more, correcting and changing specifications is easy and simple.
You know, the price of tape-out is not low!
As a result, many new architectures came into being. Therefore, research on reconfigurable processors and research on new FPGA architectures also began to flourish,
After that, FPGA's flexible use and strong applicability have also been well received in the field of communication/image processing, and it has been applied to various devices in communication networks such as routers.
Contrary to the concept of ASIC, the concept of FPGA is to allow users to get the desired logic at a low cost in a short time .
Programmable FPGA technology was invented by Xilinx Corporation of the United States in the early 1980s.
Xilinx first launched the commercial product "XC2000" in 1985.
In the past 40 years, more than 60 companies have been engaged in the research and development of FPGA technology and products.
Including Intel, IBM, AMD, TI, GE, AT&T, Motorola, Lucent, Samsung, Toshiba, Philips and other powerful companies,
But most of them fell short after spending hundreds of millions of dollars!
Economic powerhouses such as Europe, Japan, South Korea, and China's Taiwan have not really mastered their core technologies.
FPGA is a small field in the large integrated circuit industry. 5G and AI provide certainty for industry growth. Domestic substitution superimposes industry growth, and the domestic FPGA market is about to take off.
Global FPGA market size trend and future forecast:
With the help of 5G, autonomous driving, and AI, the demand for FPGAs is still gradually increasing, and the future space is still huge.
The field of communication requires high-speed communication protocol processing. On the other hand, the communication protocol is being modified at any time, which is not suitable for making a special chip. Therefore, the FPGA with flexible functions has become the first choice.
The telecommunications industry has been using FPGAs heavily. Telecommunications standards are constantly changing and building telecommunications equipment is very difficult, so the companies that offer telecommunications solutions first tend to capture the largest market share. Since ASICs take a long time to manufacture, FPGAs provide an opportunity for a shortcut. The initial versions of telecom equipment started to use FPGAs, which led to FPGA price conflicts. While the price of FPGAs is irrelevant to the ASIC emulation market, the price of telecom chips is. Many years ago, AT&T and Lucent made their own FPGAs called ORCAs (Optimized Reconfigurable Cell Arrays), but they were not competitive with Xilinx or Altera in terms of speed or size of the silicon.
FPGA is very capable of processing complex signals and can handle multi-dimensional signals.
Using FPGA to build an embedded underlying environment, and then writing some embedded software on top of it, transactional operations are more complicated, and operations on FPGA are less.
At present, it is difficult for the CPU to achieve multi-channel processing and only detection and analysis, but it can be easily solved after adding FPGA, especially in the field of graphics algorithms, which has unique advantages.
FPGA can achieve multi-channel motor control. At present, motor power consumption accounts for the majority of global energy consumption. Under the trend of energy saving and environmental protection, various types of precise control motors will be used in the future, and a single FPGA can control a large number of motors.
FPGA has been monopolized by the four giants Xilinx (Xilinx), Altera (Altera), Lattice (Lattice) and Microsemi (Microsemi) for many years.
There are also some small companies barely surviving in the cracks.
Among them, Xilinx (Xilinx) is the world's leading supplier of complete solutions for programmable logic. Xilinx develops, manufactures and sells a wide range of advanced integrated circuits, software design tools and IP (Intellectual Property) cores as predefined system-level functions.
The three foreign giants occupy 90% of the global market, and domestic manufacturers are temporarily lagging behind.
The FPGA market presents a duopoly pattern, with Xilinx and Altera occupying 56% and 31% of the global market, respectively.
In China's FPGA market, the proportion is as high as 52% and 28%,
Due to barriers in technology, capital, and talent, as well as economies of scale brought about by mass production of FPGAs, the industry leader is relatively stable.
Domestic manufacturers currently account for about 4% of the Chinese market. In the future, with the technological breakthroughs of domestic manufacturers,
Domestic substitution in the field of FPGA may be an opportunity of tens of billions, and the substitution space is vast.
Altera has been acquired by Intel, and AMD is acquiring Xilinx, which is expected to be completed by the end of 2021.
The most important concept of FPGA is IP core.
IP (Intelligent Property) core is the general term for integrated circuit cores with intellectual property cores. It is a macro module with specific functions that has been repeatedly verified. It has nothing to do with the chip manufacturing process and can be transplanted into different semiconductor processes.
If you still don't understand it, just treat it as a software module, or a component of a building block.
For example, Xilinx has designed UDP core, PCIE xDMA core, and UART core based on FPGA. We only need to add other people's cores to our project, which means that our board has already supported this function.
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