When most design groups think of the term “configurable processing,” their minds immediately go to configurable processors offered by IP vendors. But those designers may be overlooking an obvious and trusted alternative: processor- laden FPGAs. Today FPGA vendors offer high performance industry standard MPU cores on board feature-rich FPGAs.
By using a mix of FPGA vendor and EDA vendor tools and a bit of ingenuity, embedded designers can extend the instruction set of the processors running in these FPGAs to add their own unique functions to their designs. And they can do so without having to go back to school to get a degree in hardware engineering.
