On June 11, 2024, Technolution, QBayLogic and INCOSE NL are jointly organizing the “Systems Engineering meets FPGAs” seminar at the Technolution office in Gouda. It is a seminar for the system engineer, project manager or CTO to gain insight into when and where FPGAs can be used successfully.

What are “Field-Programmable Gate Arrays” (FPGAs)?

They are chips with reconfigurable logic which can be found in a multitude of applications and products, ranging from GPS-based time synchronization for a solar-powered wristwatch to the ship radar of a naval vessel. Where FPGAs were often used as a glorified switchbox in the past, they are now often found at the heart of the system. FPGAs have properties that are essential in tackling certain problems. Such properties include the ability to perform massively parallel bit-level calculations and to control processes with extreme precision, down to the nanosecond.

Choosing for an FPGA-based solution

FPGAs are a means to solve certain problems. But which problems exactly? What are the characteristics of these problems? And when is an FPGA less suitable compared to another computing platform, such as a microcontroller? And in case you do use an FPGA-based solution, what should you pay attention to when planning and developing such a solution? There are both hardware and software features to the design process when it comes to an FPGA solution. What are the pitfalls and difficulties in the design process? And how do you best defend yourself against them in the planning process?

Preliminary program