Business opportunities

"The FPGA represents the largest segment in the User-Programmable Logic (UPL) Market, as defined by the SIA [...] This market is forecast to grow from $1,895.0 million in 2005 to $2,756.7 million by 2010. The largest two end-use segments will be communications (both wired and wireless) and industrial, whose combined market share of the FPGA market will increase from 73.8% in 2005, to 76.8% by 2010."
http://www.in-stat.com/catalog/Scatalogue.asp?id=68#IN0603187SI

"[...] the number of FPGA design starts dwarfs the number of ASIC design starts and forecast that the number of FPGA design starts would grow from just over 80,000 in 2005 to more than 110,000 by 2010."
http://www.eetimes.com/conf/dac/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=164302400

"[...] Bob Muglia, senior vice-president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft: We want [the] technology to become a pervasive resource -something that's as easy to locate and use as printers are today. Microsoft is excited about the promise this holds for our customers and partners in the months and years ahead [...] When Microsoft sees money in a technology, you know it's not far from Best Buy."
http://www.chipdesignmag.com/display.php?articleId=601&issueId=0

Technology trends

"<<Little is known on how to build, program, or manage systems of 64 to 1024 processors, and the computer architecture community lacks the basic infrastructure tools required to carry out this research,>> the RAMP group writes on its web site (http://ramp.eecs.berkeley.edu/index.php). <<Fortunately, Moore's law has [...] also enabled extremely dense FPGAs.>>
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/22/ramp_mit_fix/

"Oxfordshire, UK. 9 January, 2007. Celoxica (LSE:CXA) today announced an agreement with CMC Microsystems to supply its DK Design Suite of electronic system-level (ESL) design tools for pan-Canadian university research and teaching. The deal significantly increases researcher, instructor and student access to leading-edge ESL design technologies at universities across Canada, and is supported by a plan to include the development of system level Application Programming Interface APIs for board-level integration and rapid design implementation."
http://cmc.ca/news/documents/CXA_CMC_v2.0_Press_Release_FINAL.pdf

"[...]the Simulink HDL Coder, which automatically generates synthesizable Verilog and VHDL from Simulink models and Stateflow diagrams. The move gives thousands of [...] users a direct path to FPGA or ASIC implementation"
http://www.eetimes.com/news/design/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=193001441

EDA/CAD advancements

"Trident is a compiler for floating point algorithms written in C, producing circuits in reconfigurable logic that exploit the parallelism available in the input description. Trident automatically extracts parallelism and pipelines loop bodies using conventional compiler optimizations and scheduling techniques. Trident also provides an open framework for experimentation, analysis, and optimization of floating point algorithms on FPGAs and the flexibility to easily integrate custom floating point libraries."
http://trident.sourceforge.net/

"(Xilinx's) ESL Initiative [...] expands collaboration across the ESL supply chain to better integrate and optimize ESL tool flows for both hardware designers and software programmers targeting Xilinx FPGAs"
http://www.xilinx.com/esl/

"Editor's Note: There are a lot of folks who are interested in accelerating their algorithms/programs written in C or C++. Many of these guys and gals are aware that FPGA-based accelerators are available, but they don't know how you actually make these little rascals perform their magic.
In order to address this, I contacted a number of the main players in this arena and asked each of them if they would be interested in penning an article that explained the process of [...]"
FPGA'based hardware acceleration of C/C++ based ' Part 1
FPGA'based hardware acceleration of C/C++ based ' Part 2
FPGA'based hardware acceleration of C/C++ based ' Part 3

Widespread adoption & support

"The International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays provides a relaxed atmosphere for informal information exchange, networking and stimulating discussions with the leaders in FPGA research and development from industry and academia."
http://portal.acm.org/toc.cfm?id=SERIES100

"(FCCM) is a forum to present and discuss new research on reconfigurable computing --the use of field-programmable technologies for high performance and/or low energy computation."
http://fccm.org/

"(FHPCA) is developing high-performance computing solutions using Field Programmable Gate Arrays(FPGAs) to deliver new levels of performance into the technical computing market."
http://www.fhpca.org/

"U. of Toronto has one of the most active FPGA research groups in the world. Comprising at least 5 faculty members and countless graduate students"
http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/EECG/RESEARCH/FPGA.html

Past related events

"Innovate is an India-wide multi-discipline engineering design contest open to all undergraduate and graduate engineering students in India. Innovate brings together the smartest engineering students in India, the educational leadership of BITS Pilani, and the programmable logic leadership of Altera Corporation to create an environment of learning through innovation."
http://www.innovateindia.net

"Innovate - Nordic is a multi-discipline engineering design contest open to all undergraduate and graduate engineering students in the Nordic region. Innovate brings together the smartest engineering students in Nordic region and the programmable logic leadership of Altera Corporation to create an environment of learning through innovation."
http://www.innovatenordic.com/

"[...] the Canadian Workshop on SOC for Canada's Systems-on-Chip research community to provide a forum for researchers to share information on their latest investigations in the areas of System-on-Chip and related microsystems technologies."
http://www.cmc.ca/cwsoc_2006/

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