How to Choose the Right eFPGA IP Technology Partner

A noticeable industry trend over the past couple of years has been the increased customer interest in licensing eFPGA IP. With so many options out there, how do you figure out which eFPGA IP technology partner is right for you?

?Analogous to traditional silicon IP, eFPGAs are licensable FPGA IP cores that can be directly integrated and embedded into a custom silicon solution. A customer can fully define their desired eFPGA specs, dictating everything from footprint, logic, embedded memory, DSP resources, and I/O requirements. Unlike other silicon IP, an eFPGA IP provides a designer the benefit of hardware re-programmability. Engineers can then create custom, software-defined hardware accelerator blocks at 90% lower cost and 75% lower power of a standalone FPGA.

?With that in mind, what are the criteria to look for in an eFPGA IP technology partner?

?One consideration may be: How scalable are their offerings? For the best versatility to meet any given application, an ideal IP provider can accommodate everything from small density (i.e., ~5K look-up tables) to ultra-high density (e.g., over 1 million look-up tables). While many companies can compete at small densities, Achronix is the only company that can scale to a size of over 1 million look-up tables.

?Equally as important: How good is performance? In many cases, eFPGA IP performance can degrade with increasing design complexity and size. When evaluating IP solutions, a good technology partner should be able to provide benchmarks for your given RTL requirements with sophisticated software tools. Our Speedcore eFPGA IP is proven both in silicon and in benchmarks using a wide array of benchmarks including an ARM Cortex-M0, which achieves 3× higher performance than competitors' eFPGA IP technology on the same process technology!

?This is just a start of the many considerations you may want to take. The next time you evaluate eFPGA IP technology partners, give Achronix a look!

?Read the full post here: https://www.achronix.com/blog/how-select-right-efpga-ip-technology-partner