State of the Rapidly Expanding FPGA Industry

Semiconductor Review | Wednesday, June 28, 2023

The demand for FPGAs is expanding with the influence and significance of FPGAs across a range of end-user sectors and new insights driving the market.

FREMONT, CA: FPGAs have become popular for deep and machine-learning applications due to their customizable nature, lower power consumption, and low latency. It combines programmability, speed, and flexibility to perform without the high cost and complexity of creating custom integrated circuits for particle applications (ASICs). 

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FPGAs are typically suited for the continuously changing AI world as they are reconfigurable and reprogrammable, enabling designers to test algorithms quickly and launch products rapidly. This expanding FPGAs end use in numerous sectors, offering distinctive flexibility benefits, low latency, and security to fulfil complex and changing needs are driving the market’s growth with new trends emerging in the FPGA market.

FPGA Adoption by End-Use Industries
FPGAs are employed in a wide variety of applications and end-use industries such as aerospace and defence, telecom, automotive, video and image processing, etc. A survey on finding which industries will have the highest demand for FPGAs revealed that the aerospace and defence industries will lead the FPGA adoption trend in the coming years. Additionally, the automotive and telecom sectors will have the highest FPGA demand and find the most applications in the video and image processing domain.

Geographical Region Adopting FPGA
The worldwide FPGA market, valued at five billion USD in previous years, is expected to reach 10 billion USD in the near future. In terms of geographical markets, surveys highlight APAC to lead the market in the coming years. Increasing internet adoption, growth in 4G and 5G technologies, increasing industrial automation, and rising connected device adoption, among other factors, will drive the growth in the APAC region

Languages Used to Program FPGA
FPGAs are programmed using HDLs, which are mostly low-level languages. HDLs such as VHDL and Verilog are the most popular languages for programming FPGAs. Hardware and FPGA engineers are experts in these languages, and most software engineers are unfamiliar with them, which limits their ability to build embedded systems using FPGAs.

With some of the latest tools developed by FPGA companies, it is now no longer an absolute necessity to learn these languages. Now FPGAs can be programmed using high-level languages like C and C++. Moreover, software developers can program FPGAs using their prefered languages without a profound understanding of HDLs through unified software platforms. As a result, switching to a new programming language is less stressful, and software engineers can focus more on concepts than hardware. These platforms translate higher-level languages into lower-level ones, enabling an FPGA to perform the intended task. Most people prefer to use VHDL/Verilog, followed by C/C++.

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