FPGAs: Fundamentals, Advanced Features, and Applications in Industrial Electronics [Book News

Abstract

This book presents all the facets of today’s field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology. The aim of the authors is to offer engineers and, more generally, readers who have experience in industrial electronics a good understanding of both the basics and the latest trends related to FPGAs. This task is not easy because, since their creation 30 years ago, FPGAs have always been at the edge of innovation in the field of digital electronics, and, as a consequence, they are constantly evolving. This is all the more true because, over the last five years, a deep technological mutation has affected the world of FPGAs, shifting them from the well-known regular FPGA fabric to field-programmable systems on chips that, apart from the standard FPGA fabric, also include multiprocessor cores with their ecosystem. Thus, with the great diversity of possibilities offered by this new generation of devices, the risk to both the software engineer and the hardware designer is high if they are not able to find good documents that will help them demystify the part of the component with which they are not familiar. Having clearly identified this risk, the great merit of this book is to expose, in a simple way but with rigor, all the complexity and diversity of the latest generation of FPGAs. Readers will be able to better understand why such devices can fulfill the forthcoming challenges in terms of complexity for the next generation of industrial control systems. In today’s FPGAs, one can program at the same time powerful processor cores and design application-specific hardware accelerators in the FPGA fabric.