Industry Expert Blogs
Once More, With Feeling - ARM and MIPS Return to FPGA?-October 29, 2009 |
Xilinx and Altera have each recently and respectively announced agreements with ARM and MIPS. While these announcements may be coincidental, they trigger a decade-old feeling of digital-design deja vu. A mere ten years ago, with great fanfare, Altera introduced the ill-fated Excalibur - the Titanic of FPGA families - and ushered in the era of programmable systems-on-chip with FPGAs. Like the Apple Lisa and Newton, the product itself failed, but the concept it introduced went on to flourish. Now, ten years later, that chilly feeling is back.