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A EULOGY FOR INDIVIDUAL INNOVATION

The New Generation of Programmable Logic
by John Hughes

Start ı A High Price to Pay ı The End Result ı Whatıs the Alternative? ı Sources and PDF

There was a time when you could acquire the tools and materials necessary to set up a decent digital electronics design shop and make a good living at it. A lot of innovative products came out of those small shops, and a lot of todayıs senior engineers cut their teeth building prototypes and debugging their designs using little more than a second-hand ıscope and maybe a used logic analyzer (if they were lucky). Unfortunately, it appears that those days are rapidly fading.

For the past five years or so, the prevailing trend in digital design has been to move away from discrete logic devices in favor of programmable logic. This is both good and bad. Itıs good in that it reduces the production cost of the end product by simplifying the physical design. It also allows for enhanced functionality as a result of the increased gate density of the programmable logic over discrete TTL without incurring a cost penalty for more parts and more PCB real estate. For example, a network interface card that was once covered with logic and required some serious effort to produce can now be had with just a few chips on it, one of which is a programmable device. In some cases, both cards have the same model number and do exactly the same functions, but the newer version is easier to build, suffers fewer failures during production, and has helped to keep the prices of networking hardware low.

On the other hand, itıs bad from the standpoint of the small shop owner or individual engineer who canıt afford the tools required for the cutting edge in programmable logic because they are astoundingly expensive. VHDL is a tool available only to a select few, and the little folks are being slowly squeezed from the design market with each passing day. This is unfortunate, however, it is also no coincidence.

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