From a design tools perspective, the continued march of the commodity FPGA marks its emergence as the advantaged platform for systems-level design. The beauty of this is that the FPGA vendors can crack the 90-nanometer barrier and designers get a million or more gates at a price that works for an ever-wider range of applications.

We can see a "soft" future opening up here, where programmability provides a forgiving platform for rapid design implementation. Freedom from verification-driven methodologies for systems-level design will emerge as one of the keys to moving mainstream design into the programmable realm. Another will be the availability of presynthesized, soft FPGA "components" that can be delivered in packaged form and used to quickly build a testable system on the engineer's desktop.

As the per-gate price falls, so do the current limits on achievable designs. This opens the door to more ambitious projects that bring something like an entire 16- or 32-bit digital system into the FPGA. Proprietary processor cores such as MicroBlaze, PicoBlaze and Nios support this move but impose a nonstandard instruction set on the embedded developer. This indicates an opportunity to bring known processor architectures into this market. But there is no existing model for FPGA-based licensing of these known and trusted entities. Tying users to a proprietary solution serves the FPGA vendor's short-term interest but undermines the wider, inevitable move to programmable design.

To bridge this gap, existing semiconductor companies might share in this emerging ecosystem by exploiting the potential packaging of their intellectual property (IP) into the kind of soft FPGA components we're describing. Branding these components will provide a new business model to support IP development where source code can remain safely with the owner and object-level code is licensed to the client. In this model, branding implies a level of certification that does not exist in the current IP marketplace. Semiconductor IP holders who support this "soft foundry" concept will open the door to wider exploitation of the unlimited horizons of programmable product design.

Nick Martin, Founder and Joint CEO, Altium Ltd., Sydney, Australia