SemiEngineering: ML Opening New Doors For FPGAs

Excerpt from article: “ML Opening New Doors For FPGAs”

FPGAs have long been used in the early stages of any new digital technology, given their utility for prototyping and rapid evolution. But with machine learning, FPGAs are showing benefits beyond those of more conventional solutions.

This opens up a hot new market for FPGAs, which traditionally have been hard to sustain in high-volume production due to pricing, and hard to use for battery-driven and other low-power applications. Their principal benefit remains flexibility, which is extraordinarily important for an industry as changeable as machine learning (ML). Not only do applications change in general, but networks and models can morph rapidly as continued training adds further refinements. and different vendors have different ways of addressing it.

“There’s a continuing battle between GPUs, FPGAs, and ASICs,” said Anoop Saha, market development manager at Siemens EDA. “If the FPGA vendors didn’t supply [tools], then they’d have no chance.”

Read the entire article on SemiEngineering originally published on June 24th, 2020.