Evolutionary improvements expand the capabilities of popular FPGA families

Most, if not all, current FPGA architectures are designed to be general-purpose, balancing trade-offs among speed, cost, density, and ease-of-use. These architectures have met the needs of many designers and have created a wide applications base for FPGAs. However, different applications, of course, have differing requirements. For example, gate density and speed may be the most critical factors when selecting an FPGA device for an image processing application, but pricing, packaging, and power consumption considerations may dominate when designing a modem for a portable computer. To better meet these varying needs and further expand the range of applications that can be addressed by FPGA technology, several new FPGA devices have been created by modifying the architectures of the popular XC2000, XC3000, and XC4000 FPGA families. The author discusses these FPGA devices