Future of FPGA in Defense system

Defense electronics requirements are expanding the envelopes of performance, high speed serial IO like SRIO and PCIe, dedicated DSP capabilities and faster memories interfaces like DDR3. Current generation FPGAs address these aspects and are gaining the centre stage in many applications like RADAR Data Acquisition and processing, Beam forming, Target Simulation, ECM, Signal Intelligence, Communication Intelligence, Telemetry, etc.

FPGAs also offer an advantage of testing and verifying a concept in hardware without passing through the long fabrication process required for an ASIC. Engineers can then make changes and can run number of iterations on an FPGA within hours, rather than in weeks. As design requirements often change over a period of time, the cost of implementing these incremental changes to FPGAs are almost negligible as compared to the large expense associated as ASICs.

A variety of pre verified IP cores available for FPGAs bring down the development time drastically. Pre-tested and verified IPs enable system designers to focus on integrating readymade IPs, rather than starting from scratch. ARM, PPC, Ethernet MAC, PCIe end point, memory controllers, Microblaze, NIOS, etc., are some examples of highly accepted cores in the market.

FPGAs are mainly sought out by customers for upgrading the performance of existing systems or subsystems. A significant benefit of using FPGAs is the considerable reduction in volume, weight and the associated improvements in reliability and ruggedness that they offer to Defense electronics. The latest FPGAs have inbuilt processors like ARM and PPC to address newer applications that also require sequential capabilities of a processor in a single package. All these factors are leading to a scenario where customers can now port complex applications implemented on one or more processors to FPGAs resulting in as much as 10x performance gains.

While FPGA performance will continue to increase dramatically, the challenge lies in lowering power consumption. This has now become the focus area for many vendors. Although the newest 28nm generation FPGAs consumes less power than previous 90nm products, FPGAs still consume a large share of total system power. Designers nowadays design into tighter and smaller spaces, making it hard to provide better airflow and set up proper size heat sinks. Therefore, thermal management and consequently power management both contribute to an area of concern for high-end FPGA design.

FPGA programming tools help systems designers or integrators comply with the DO-254 standard for assuring quality and safety for airborne electronic hardware. The success stories of critical missions like the Mars Rover have increased the confidence on military and space-grade FPGA in the market.

As the size, capabilities and speed of FPGAs increase, some of them are now being marketed as full System-on-Chips (SoCs). SoC FPGAs provide performance that cannot be achieved by multiple-chip solutions. SoC FPGA combines the high performance and low power consumption of hard IP core with flexibility of programmable logic. Ultimately, FPGAs enable system engineers to work more productively, improve software quality and deliver the final system faster.

The team at Mistral has successfully worked on many FPGA-based turnkey solutions across domains such as Target Simulation, Beam forming, RADAR receivers, Direction Finding, Telemetry and Airborne & Ship-borne RADAR/Sonar. Capabilities of the Mistral FPGA team has a vast spread covering TCP/IP, UDP, Aurora, SRIO, PCIe, sFPDP, DDR2/DDR3, QDR, PPC, MicroBlaze, NIOS, DDC, DUC, Windowing, FFT, Pulse compression, Correlation and Coherent signal processing, among other areas.

Mistral has a strong FPGA design-to-deployment capability to compliment its core strength of designing complete Defense subsystems. Mistral is also a Certified Member of the Xilinx Alliance Program in India. The team’s expertise lies in designing, building and deploying customized FPGA based solutions that integrate custom software and hardware engineering. As an established company providing cutting-edge technologies and solutions, Mistral is committed to delivering the best products and systems, meeting the unique requirements of Indian Defense.