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Figure 1. (Left) Arrayed building blocks are connected via interconnect wires; (Right) Fully featured
FPGAs include a variety of advanced building blocks.
Figure 1 illustrates the variety of building blocks available in an FPGA. The core fabric implements digital
logic with Look-up tables (LUTs), Flip-Flops (FFs), Wires, and I/O pads. FPGAs today also include Multiply-
accumulate (MAC) blocks for DSP functions, Off-chip memory controllers, High-speed serial transceivers,
embedded, distributed memories, Phase-locked loops (PLLs), hardened PCIe interfaces, and range from
1,000 to over 2,000,0000 logic elements.
FPGAs in Mission-Critical Applications
Mission-critical applications (e.g., autonomous vehicle, manufacturing, etc.) require deterministic low-
latency. The data flow pattern in such applications may be in streaming form, requiring pipelined-
oriented processing. FPGAs are excellent for these kinds of use cases given their support for fine-
grained, bit-level operations in comparison to CPU and GPUs. FPGAs also provide customizable I/O,
allowing their integration with these sorts of applications.
In autonomous driving or factory automation where response time can be critical, one benefit of FPGAs
is that they allow tailored logic for dedicated functions. This means that the FPGA logic becomes custom
circuitry but highly reconfigurable, yielding very low compute time and latency. Another key factor may
be power – the cost per performance per watt may be of concern when determining long-term viability.
Since the logic in FPGA has been tailored for a specific application/workload, the logic is very efficient at
executing that application which leads to lower power or increased perf per watt. By comparison, CPUs
may need to execute 1000’s of instructions to perform the same function that an FPGA maybe able to
implement in just a few cycles.