learn more here What's Next For Programmable Devices?
Microprocessor and programmable logic invent are converging, though they still require a tasteless language. After one of my engineers told me that she had found a typo in her hardware, I opinion just how far invent has come in the last 30 years and more. Back then, the analog section of a ideas consisted of varied components and op amps. The digital section was implemented with either small-scale integrated (Ssi) Ics or custom logic. I showed this engineer the minute green logic template I used back then. She opinion it was cute.
What's Next For Programmable Devices?
A Time To Break Away
Engineers seldom have to invent with varied components anymore. Integrated analog-to-digital converters (Adcs), digitalto-analog converters (Dacs), high-speed amplifiers, and switch capacitor Ics are now facilely available. The most truly amazing advances, however, have been in digital design. The shortage of logic chip designers and the cost of invent has led to amelioration along two separate avenues: microprocessors and programmable logic.
Microprocessors led to the need for capability and documentation metrics for invent and implementation. The expanding of digital peripherals resulted in the microcontroller.
Armed with timers, counters, Uarts, and other features, many complete digital systems could be implemented with a particular chip. Adding a specialized peripheral containing a multiply-accumulator (Mac) and the logic needed to load and unload it yielded the digital signal processor (Dsp).
Analog components such as amplifiers, comparators, Adcs, and Dacs have been integrated into microcontrollers to help build a more complete system. These, however, have been fixed in performance. To fine-tune selection, separate chips furnish separate accuracy, resolution, and sample speed components. The aggregate of separate digital and analog peripherals has caused some microcontroller manufacturers to furnish thousands of separate "flavors" of their parts. And when further functions were required, they would have to be implemented with external hardware.
Engineers have risen to the occasion with programmable logic, not only through innovative chip topologies but also the tools to use them. Early programming was done by selecting the fuses from a printed fuse map. Palasm, the first language to agenda logic devices, was used to express Boolean equations. Studying the benefits of a tasteless language from software, developers created Verilog and Vhdl.
Designers now had a tasteless language to invent across separate platforms, and hardware could be developed using a logical language. Also, chip manufacturers could go back to developing chips instead of tools. All these tools not only can define a invent but test and verify its execution as well. This has led to digital invent becoming a very disciplined art. It is also quite tasteless for digital designers to split up their work, one doing the invent on one chip while the other creates the test vectors.
A Time To Bring It All Together
Combining the advantages of microcontrollers, programmable digital logic, and analog peripherals, a truly programmable reconfigurable system-on-a-chip (SoC) would have programmable logic to allow the invent of exact digital peripherals; a programmable language to support invent and verification; the reprogrammability of Fpgas and their evaporative configuration registers; permanent-configuration complicated programmable-logic device registers for immediate hardware configuration at startup; a Cpu with tasteless digital and analog peripherals; and analog circuitry that can be reconfigured to invent analog and mixed-signal peripherals.
There have been any attempts to add programmable logic to microcontrollers. As transistor geometries get smaller and digital gates come to be closer to free, this should come to be more tasteless in SoC architectures. In the future, the dilemma of selecting between permanent and evaporative registers will be resolved by loading evaporative registers immediately with a permanent Rom base register at startup, permitting hardware reconfiguration while allowing quick execution at startup.
This becomes feasible as transistor geometries get smaller. Some examples already can be seen.
As more configurable analog is added to SoC architectures, it will have to function well within Cmos invent processes. Designs will have as minute analog as possible, boasting post-digital processing. This is the very definition of mixed-signal design. High-level components can then be implemented for exact resolution and sample speed with commutating amplifiers removing the dc offset and high 1/f noise (wander) inherent with Cmos transistors.
Such SoCs will start with a Cpu and exact hardware peripherals. But as transistors come to be free, they will be implemented with programmable logic. Already, "softcore Cpus" are implemented with large Fpgas. And, there will need to be a invent language. Analog invent is still very graphically oriented, and a way is needed to be able to define an analog ideas in a logical written matter.
This language also must take from the digital society and have some way of testing and verifying the design's performance. I have no idea what this language will look like. However, at the time I had no idea what "C," Verilog, or Vhdl would look like either.
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