An analysis of the embedded system design space and two case studies, replacing uP's with an FPGA

Abstract

This paper first presents an analysis of the embedded system design space. Two case studies are then presented. The first case study shows how several UPS can be replaced by one FPGA in an automobile application, not only improving performance, but also reducing cost, time to market and other important constraints. In the second case study, one UP was replaced by an FPGA to lower cost and power consumption. The FPGA design included a behavioral controller. The behavioral controller is a design technique used when replacing a UP with an FPGA. The behavioral controller is designed in VHDL at RT-level to handle all scheduling, allocation and different forms of pipelining in the FPGA. This method results in a very small, cost effective, high performance FPGA.