"When we first tried to get the embedded community to look on our FPGAs not as programmable logic but as embedded processors, we got killed because of the software development tools," said Tim Erjavec, a Xilinx marketing manager. At ESC, engineers tried out Xilinx development kits for the PowerPC and MicroBlaze processors, targeted to the Virtex-4 FPGAs. The kits, which started shipping Sept. 12, include a development board, the embedded tool suite, an in-circuit emulator, reference designs and more than 60 intellectual property (IP) cores. Erjavec said the kits — priced at less than $1,000 — include an arsenal of software productivity boosters, ranging from wizards to pull-down menus and a complete integrated development environment (IDE) based on the Eclipse platform.

For the past two decades, FPGAs have proceeded in a largely horizontal direction, with telecommunications as the primary vertical market. Now Xilinx and its partners are creating the particular types of IP that will help vendors succeed in such growing markets as automotive and medical systems.

Robert Day, director of marketing at Accelerated Technology, a subsidiary of Mentor Graphics Corp., said the software development tools needed to program the "soft" processors from Actel, Altera and Xilinx have improved enough that engineers now have "a fighting chance to get them actually working."

At the ESC show, Accelerated Technology demonstrated its small-footprint, real-time operating system, called Nucleus, running on the Xilinx soft cores and the Nios soft core from Altera Corp. The Nucleus development tools, which run on an Eclipse platform, provide an alternative to the Eclipse-based IDEs from the FPGA vendors, making it possible for design teams to plug tools into their Eclipse platform, as needed, from a variety of vendors.

Day estimated that about half of the FPGAs that have soft processor cores onboard employ an operating system to manage concurrent tasks, with the others used for sequential processes that do not require an OS. He quoted research, presented at the conference by CMP Media LLC, owner of both EE Times and the ESC show, that showed about 60 percent of the embedded-development engineers said they planned to use an FPGA in their next design. Of those, about 40 percent said they are considering a soft processor on the FPGA.

"If you do the math, that means about 25 percent of new embedded designs from the people who responded to the survey may include a soft processor core in their next designs. To me, that sounds a bit high, but even if the number is 10 or 15 percent, there is no doubt that FPGA-based processors are becoming significant in the embedded space," Day said.

The Eclipse platform, which was placed into an open-source group called the Eclipse Foundation by IBM Corp., is gaining traction within the embedded community as a means of plugging in compilers, editors, debuggers and other software development tools, Day said. During the past year, Wind River, the largest player in what it calls the "device software optimization" sector, has moved its IDE from a proprietary user interface and platform to Eclipse. And companies including Accelerated Technology, Altera, Texas Instruments and Xilinx, have based their tools on the Eclipse platform.

Nokia plans to announce today that it will lead the development of an Eclipse framework for mobile Java development tools, contributing its own tools to an effort aimed at offering complete tooling support for the Java for Mobile Environment standard.