Many types of programmable logic are available.
Hardware designers must learn how to write better programs, and software developers must learn how to utilize programmable logic. So rather than try to nail down a precise boundary between hardware and software design, we must assume that there will be overlap in the two fields. Regardless of where the line is drawn, there will continue to be engineers like you and me who cross the boundary in our work.
I'm not convinced that an unambiguous distinction between hardware and software can ever be found, but I don't think that matters all that much. Does it matter that one chip is a memory device and the other a piece of And both designs are ultimately loaded into some piece of silicon. So language differences alone are not enough of a distinction.īoth hardware and software designs are compiled from a human-readable form into a machine-readable one. There are even now products that allow designers to create their hardware designs in traditional programming languages like C. Turing's notion of machine-level equivalence and the existence of language-to-language translators have long ago taught us all that that kind of reasoning is foolish. Surely no one would claim that language choice alone marks a real distinction between the two fields. After all, both hardware and software designers are now describing logic in high-level terms, albeit in different languages, and downloading the compiled result to a piece of silicon. Some system designers are buying processor cores and incorporating them into system-on-a-chip designs others are eliminating the processor and software altogether, choosing an alternative hardware-only design.Īs this trend continues, it becomes more difficult to separate hardware from software. What all of this means is that the price of an individual element is rapidly approaching zero! And the designers of embedded systems are taking note. Meanwhile, the price of these chips is dropping. The maximum number of gates in an FPGA is currently around 500,000 and doubling every 18 months. Over the past few years, the density of the average programmable logic device has begun to skyrocket. This article will help you make sense of programmable logic.Ī quiet revolution is taking place. Hardware now engineers create the bulk of their new digital circuitry in programming languages such as VHDL and Verilog.
In recent years, the line between hardware and software has blurred.