Engineers seldom have to design with discrete components anymore. Integrated analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), digitalto-analog converters (DACs), high-speed amplifiers, and switch capacitor ICs are now readily available. The most truly amazing advances, however, have been in digital design. The shortage of logic chip designers and the expense of design has led to development along two different avenues: microprocessors and programmable logic. Combining the advantages of microcontrollers, programmable digital logic, and analog peripherals, a truly programmable reconfigurable system-on-a-chip (SoC) would have programmable logic to allow the design of specific digital peripherals; a programmable language to support design and verification; the reprogrammability of FPGAs and their volatile configuration registers; permanent-configuration complex programmable-logic device registers for immediate hardware configuration at startup; a CPU with common digital and analog peripherals; and analog circuitry that can be reconfigured to design analog and mixed-signal peripherals. To read more, click the download link below or visit Electronic Design.
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