this article is a nice FAQ for efpga...
so if you are a part owner of this business read it a few times. thnks




January 23, 2018
eFPGAs Go Mainstream
After Decades of “Why Not?”
by Kevin Morris

https://www.eejournal.com/article/efpgas-go-mainstream/






January 23, 2018
eFPGAs Go Mainstream
After Decades of “Why Not?”
by Kevin Morris
For decades, the idea of embedded FPGA fabric has been hanging around the industry like a comic sidekick – providing entertaining conversation, but never really taking part in the plot. The concept seemed solid enough on paper. Put some LUT fabric on your ASIC along with the other stuff and you get additional flexibility, maybe avoiding the almost-inevitable need to park an expensive FPGA right next to your ASIC when your chip lands on a board. LUTs are not rocket science, and adding some programmable logic to a design should be a pretty simple proposition – from a hardware design perspective, at least.

Unfortunately, actually making productive use of that embedded FPGA fabric was a much scarier proposition. The big FPGA companies have made an enormous investment in design tools that smoothly take your RTL and crunch it into a working bitstream that can program their devices. The companies who were offering embedded FPGA IP for ASIC design had minimal tools at best, and most chip design teams were highly reluctant to give up a bunch of silicon real estate on their device for something that might or might not be useful.

Now, all that seems to have changed. A number of companies have entered the eFPGA fray, and, from all appearances, the concept is getting traction. Every vendor we talked to reports major design wins, and a confluence of several technical and market factors seems to have suddenly paved the road for rapid growth in eFPGA adoption.

There are at least five vendors offering eFPGA technology at this point – Menta, Flex Logix, Achronix, QuickLogic, and ADICSYS. Interestingly, these companies cannot really be considered “competitors” with each other because each one (at this point) seems to be focusing on a particular market segment or application area. It would be surprising if there were many situations where a design team was evaluating more than one of these for a particular project.

Two of the current suppliers, Achronix and QuickLogic, also sell FPGAs. That means they both have years (or even decades) of development and experience supporting robust FPGA design tool suites. Both companies’ tool suites are well regarded by their FPGA customers, and that should carry over into their eFPGA offerings. The two companies’ target markets are at opposite ends of the spectrum, however.

Achronix is aiming at “high-performance, compute-intensive and real-time processing applications such as AI, machine learning, 5G wireless, networking, and automotive” with their Speedcore eFPGA IP. Achronix has a core generator that creates custom-configured IP blocks with the size and capabilities required for your application. Their ACE design tool suite is used to program the custom block. Achronix claims significant benefits for using embedded (versus stand-alone) FPGAs, with power savings (dynamic plus static) estimated at over 50%, latencies reduced by an order of magnitude, considerably lower system cost, and reduced board size and complexity. Most of these savings are a result of eliminating the 2 sets of high-speed IOs that are required to connect an ASIC/SoC to a conventional FPGA. Speedcore is available on TSMC 16FF+ and is in development on TSMC 7nm.

Achronix can build embedded arrays of “any size” that include your desired mix of blocks: logic blocks with 4-input look-up-tables (LUTs), plus integrated wide mux functions and fast adders, logic RAM with up to 4 kb per memory block, block RAM with up to 20 kb per memory block, and DSP64 blocks, where each block has a 18 × 27 multiplier, 64-bit accumulator and 27-bit pre-adder. Obviously, you can build a substantial amount of accelerator or DSP capability on your chip with this technology. Achronix’s business has exploded in the past year since the announcement ofSpeedcore, and the company has locked in numerous design wins.

The QuickLogic ArcticPro eFPGA offering sits on the opposite end of the spectrum. Rather than the hundreds of thousands of LUTs possible with Achronix, QuickLogic offers embedded blocks in the 16×16 up to 64×64 LUT range. Targeting mobile/consumer-class designs, QuickLogic is aiming at IoT edge applications such as wearables, and their eFPGA is going for the attention of the microwatt crowd. QuickLogic supports the larger geometries popular in consumer-grade SoCs such as 65nm and 40nm processes from GLOBALFOUNDRIES and SMIC, and now they are designing for the 22nm process.