Keeping the Costs Down with FPGA Design Services
Do you have a great idea for a new electronic product? If you don't have the budget that is usually needed for customized ASIC, you might decide to go for FPGA design services instead. Field Programmable Gate Arrays, or FPGA as they are known, use standard parts to build a prototype these days. The logic blocks and interconnects are used in other applications and can be reprogrammed to work differently, so it is virtually using something that is already done to create a specific or customized chip.
They are ideal for a low volume production or for smaller designs due to the cheaper cost. Very often the cost of non-recurring engineering for an ASIC can climb to billions of dollars. This might be fine for such things as mobile phones that are going to have a high sales output, but it would make the cost of certain other products that had a low sales volume prohibitive.
A gate-array design is considered to be a semi-customized ASIC as the base components are already available. There may be as few as two or as many as nine perpendicular metal layers used, but photolithographic masks are only needed for these and for nothing else, hence keeping production costs down. But as with many other cost-cutting measures there are some problems, mainly that 100% utilization cannot usually be achieved.
However, with the technology available today and improving all the time, FPGA design services are far more affordable and offer a product that can do what it is supposed to do well, while not costing the earth to manufacture. This is good news to most inventors or manufacturing companies that want to bring out a new product without it costing them too much.
Pure logic-only, gate array design has been replaced by devices that are field programmable and have minimal tooling charges thus keeping down the piece part cost while still offering a comparable performance. Thus we can see that technology is working towards keeping down costs while providing valuable products, and the services to implement their manufacture.
The invention of the silicon chip or ASIC is one of the few things that has had a far-reaching effect on our world and changed it for the better in many more ways than anyone could imagine. Without it we would not have nearly the number of amazing goods and products that we use today, often without any thought as to what makes them work so well.
They are ideal for a low volume production or for smaller designs due to the cheaper cost. Very often the cost of non-recurring engineering for an ASIC can climb to billions of dollars. This might be fine for such things as mobile phones that are going to have a high sales output, but it would make the cost of certain other products that had a low sales volume prohibitive.
A gate-array design is considered to be a semi-customized ASIC as the base components are already available. There may be as few as two or as many as nine perpendicular metal layers used, but photolithographic masks are only needed for these and for nothing else, hence keeping production costs down. But as with many other cost-cutting measures there are some problems, mainly that 100% utilization cannot usually be achieved.
However, with the technology available today and improving all the time, FPGA design services are far more affordable and offer a product that can do what it is supposed to do well, while not costing the earth to manufacture. This is good news to most inventors or manufacturing companies that want to bring out a new product without it costing them too much.
Pure logic-only, gate array design has been replaced by devices that are field programmable and have minimal tooling charges thus keeping down the piece part cost while still offering a comparable performance. Thus we can see that technology is working towards keeping down costs while providing valuable products, and the services to implement their manufacture.
The invention of the silicon chip or ASIC is one of the few things that has had a far-reaching effect on our world and changed it for the better in many more ways than anyone could imagine. Without it we would not have nearly the number of amazing goods and products that we use today, often without any thought as to what makes them work so well.
