CircuiTree - August 2008 - (Page 25)

Figure 1 Programmable Hardware Design Within FPGAs Has Revolutionized Board Design to a Point Where Less Does More. All That’s Left on Board Are the Electronics and Hardware Needed to Interface an FPGA to the Outside World The drivers of these developments can be grouped in two inﬂuential trends: the wholesale move toward a soft-centric design approach and the increasing inﬂuence of a product’s mechanical design in the board development process. Both of these changes are driven by significant developments within the electronics design industry that are here to stay. To remain competitive while creating tomorrow’s products, designers from all disciplines need to respond to these developments by considering the overall product design task and how the domains share design data—particularly between the electrical and mechanical design environments. The Drivers of Change From a business standpoint, the obvious shift in the electronics industry is globalization of the market from both a sales and product development perspective. This is represented by a world-scale revolution in the way many products, or key elements of those products, are now designed, manufactured, and distributed. The tangible result of this change can be seen in the form of low-cost electronic products that have now become commodity items—look no further than the DVD players at your local retailer. Irrespective of the development origins, these devices have been transformed from a unique product to a universal, low-cost product that applies to a worldwide market. Whether it’s a consumer product, an industrial controller, or display subassembly, globalization—the move to a single, highly-competitive world marketplace—creates an environment where commodity products pour onto the world market from the most cost-effective manu- facturing regions. For both big and small companies worldwide, this also opens the opportunity to outsource cost-sensitive processes, typically manufacturing and distribution, on a world scale. The move to off-shoring and the general trend to global product commoditization have generated entire categories of products that can only be differentiated from each other on price. This change has challenged the fundamental thinking on what makes a product unique, desirable, and ultimately successful in today’s highly competitive market. Thanks to global competitiveness, creating a product for a slightly lower price might gain a temporary market advantage, but it’s only a matter of time before this is undercut by an equivalent product from somewhere on the globe. Similarly, getting a product to market ﬁrst is, by deﬁnition, only a temporary competitive advantage because others will quickly follow to dissolve that gain. Both these approaches can only create brief windows of competitive opportunity and should be regarded as target survival drivers rather than a path to achieving sustained product differentiation. The hard facts are that while there are essential criteria for today’s board designs—meeting cost, quality, deadline, and performance goals—the physical electronics hardware itself will not deliver sustainable market differentiation to the ﬁnal product. Any unique intellectual property in the physical hardware is relatively easy to reproduce and therefore cannot remain unique. What’s more, virtually all components and subassemblies within the design are universal commodity items in themselves and are available to all designers—one USB subblock or display interface is pretty much like any other. Along with market globalization and the proliferation of commodity electronics, the electronics industry is undergoing an era of unprecedented technological change. This has been driven by factors such as the increasing connectivity of electronics products and, in particular, the advent of low-cost, large-scale programmable devices. Reprogrammable devices such as FPGAs have created a revolution in the way products are designed by offering an open-ended platform for creating complex soft hardware in the programmable design space. For some time the competitive factors of a design have largely been deﬁned by software rather than physical hardware, but the introduction of programmable hardware allows that soft inﬂuence to enter into the electronics design itself. The functional intelligence that determines a product’s competitive edge can now be deﬁned in both software and hardware. The impact of this is signiﬁcant from a board design perspective because an ever-increasing number of PCB designs now contain one or more programmable devices. These are likely to be large, high pin-count (or BGA) FPGA devices that present substantial board routing challenges but tend to reduce the total number of components on the board. The most obvious reason for that is that the majority of logic devices required by the design can be transferred into the fabric of an FPGA, saving considerable board real estate and reducing the layout complexity. The less immediately obvious, but far more potent, impact of FPGAs is the potential for virtually an entire design—including microprocessors, memory, peripheral bocks, and interfaces—to be contained within the FPGA. With this approach, the remaining on-board electronics and hardware simply provide the interface to the outside world. Routing the board also presents unique challenges when FPGAs are involved because the pin conﬁguration (the functional position and electrical characteristic of each pin) is fully programmable and determined within the FPGA—rather than the board—design domain. circuitree.com • August 2008 25 http://circuitree.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CircuiTree - August 2008

CirciuTree - August 2008 Contents My Line Industry Review Tech Talk Flexible Thinking Creating Connections Between Electronics Design and Manufacturing Happy Thoughts View From the Middle Market Outlook Fein Lines IPCA Showcase Technical Product Spotlights Classified Ads Upcoming Events Ad Index Buyers Guide

CircuiTree - August 2008

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