На всяких народных гуляниях типа MakerFaire и OpenSauce меня постоянно спрашивают при виде FPGA “Это Ардуино / Raspberry Pi?” Причем когда я отвечаю “нет”, у людей появляется выражение лица будто я им нагрубил. Я раньше не понимал, с чем это связано, но теперь думаю, что цель такого вопроса - просто показать свою эрудицию, а я эту цель обламываю. Кроме этого минимум у одной дамы было такое выражение лица, что она наверное подумала, что я сумасшедший.

Теперь при использований микросхем малой степени интеграции появляется второй вопрос “разве все эти микросхемы не устарели и не были заменены Ардуино?”

Короче для Technology Showcase в Mountain View в этот четверг я решил сделать вот такую одну страничку и просто молча давать ее людям, которые задают эти два вопроса. Первая сторона:

Текст (но прошу посмотреть на имиджи):

During shows like OpenSauce and MakerFaire there are two questions people ask again and again. So I decided to create a one-page leaflet and simply give it to them. There will be an event in Mountain View this Thursday, called the Technology Showcase. So:

The plain text (please review the images and give me feedback):

QUESTION: Is this an Arduino? Is this a Raspberry Pi?

ANSWER: No. Arduino is a microcontroller board and RPi carries an embedded microprocessor. Here we have a board with an FPGA: Field Programmable Gate Array which does not have a CPU core inside. The structure of Arduino or RPi is fixed at the silicon foundry. FPGA allows to form a digital circuit on the fly. A matrix of cells with changeable function. One cell can become AND, another OR, yet another - one bit of memory. An FPGA does not contain a fixed CPU, but can be configured to work as a CPU.

[A side observation: when I say “No” some people feel uneasy. I guess they just want to show they know what Arduino/Raspberry Pi is. Answering them “No” is perceived as something impolite.]

FPGA applications:

Education: Can be used to train ASIC designers. Build your own CPU without a bunch of discrete components and wires.

Prototyping: Debug functionality of ASIC designs before manufacturing, albeit at a lower frequency than the final ASIC.

Video processing: High bandwidth and parallelism compensates for lower clock frequency.

High-frequency trading: FPGA delivers low latency.

Space: A mix of FPGAs and MCUs makes better economic sense than custom ASICs. Because the number of space rockets is less than the number of smartphones in the World.

Вторая сторона:

QUESTION: Why do you teach kids small-scale integration ICs like CMOS 4000 series? Aren’t they all obsolete and replaced by Arduino?

ANSWER: Programming Arduino does not teach microelectronics.

Breadboarding with an old CMOS 4013 chip from 1968 is still the best way to demo the function of a D-Flip-Flop (DFF).

The function is the same for an old 20 micron chip and a new 2 nanometer smartphone chip.

The knowledge about logic gates and DFFs is a prerequisite for learning Register Transfer Level (RTL) methodology used in Apple, Samsung, NVidia to design modern chips.

Programming Arduino does not expose DFFs.

After small-scale integration the students move to FPGA exercises and ASIC design using Tiny Tapeout.