TABLE OF CONTENTS Reconfigurable hardware is becoming available with large enough capacity and performance to support complete systems. Opportunities for taking an integrated software/hardware approach to systems development will increase, and need to be assessed for many applications. FPGAs and PLDs can be configured using software techniques not unfamiliar to software engineers working in the field of real-time systems. This chapter does not attempt to introduce the VHDL or Verilog languages, but rather the context for their use, in the development of modern real-time systems.
Many electronic engineers and programmers think that we are on the threshold of another major technical paradigm shift which will again adjust the functional dividing line between hardware and software. This could be compared with the emergence of microprocessors in the 1970s, and the subsequent change in everyone's expectation of commodity electronic components which could, for the first time, be used to build 'stored program control' equipment. The current discussion concerns Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) which are reconfigurable circuits, large enough to carry out all the systems functions for many common applications. Thus, in many circumstances, it is actually possible to shrink a complete mother- board with electronic components to a single monolithic chip of silicon. Such an opportunity is of major interest to real-time systems designers. The possibility of implementing dynamically self-reconfiguring hardware may also excite attention.
The capability of such 'systems-on-a-chip' has rapidly improved over the last decade as production competence within the chip fabrication...
