Download The relative of ASIC, FPGA , DSP, Embedded and BIOS in Electronic

The relative of ASIC, FPGA , DSP, Embedded and BIOS in Electronic System
Engineering.
An embedded system is a computer system with a dedicated function within a larger
mechanical or electrical system, often with real-time computing constraints. It is embedded as
part of a complete device often including hardware and mechanical parts. Embedded systems
control many devices in common use today
Picture of the internals of an ADSL modem/router. A
modern example of an embedded system. Labelled
parts include a microprocessor (4), RAM (6), and flash
memory (7).
Basic Input/Output System also known as BIOS is built in PC, and it is the first
software run by a PC when powered on. The puposes of the BIOS are to initialize and test the
system hardware components, and to load a boot loader or an operating system from a mass
memory device.
Digital signal processing (DSP) is the mathematical manipulation of an information
signal to modify or improve it in some way. It is characterized by the representation of
discrete time, discrete frequency, or other discrete domain signals by a sequence of numbers
or symbols and the processing of these signals.
The goal of DSP is usually to measure, filter and/or compress continuous real-world analog
signals. Usually, the first step is conversion of the signal from an analog to a digital form, by
sampling and then digitizing it using an analog-to-digital converter (ADC), which turns the
analog signal into a stream of discrete digital values. Often, however, the required output
signal is also analog, which requires a digital-to-analog converter (DAC). Even if this process
is more complex than analog processing and has a discrete value range, the application of
computational power to signal processing allows for many advantages over analog processing
in many applications, such as error detection and correction in transmission as well as data
compression.
Digital signal processing and analog signal processing are subfields of signal
processing. DSP applications include audio and speech signal processing, sonar and radar
signal processing, sensor array processing, spectral estimation, statistical signal processing,
digital image processing, signal processing for communications, control of systems,
biomedical signal processing, seismic data processing, among others.
An example of the 2D discrete wavelet transform that is used
in JPEG2000. The original image is high-pass filtered, yielding the
three large images, each describing local changes in brightness
(details) in the original image. It is then low-pass filtered and
downscaled, yielding an approximation image; this image is highpass filtered to produce the three smaller detail images, and lowpass
filtered to produce the final approximation image in the upper-left.
A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is an integrated circuit designed to be
configured by a customer or a designer after manufacturing – hence "field-programmable".
The FPGA configuration is generally specified using a hardware description language (HDL),
similar to that used for an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) (circuit diagrams
were previously used to specify the configuration, as they were for ASICs, but this is
increasingly rare).
Some FPGAs have analog features in addition to digital functions. The most common analog
feature is programmable slew rate and drive strength on each output pin, allowing the
engineer to set slow rates on lightly loaded pins that would otherwise ring or couple
unacceptably, and to set stronger, faster rates on heavily loaded pins on high-speed channels
that would otherwise run too slowly. Another relatively common analog feature is differential
comparators on input pins designed to be connected to differential signaling channels. A few
"mixed signal FPGAs" have integrated peripheral analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and
digital-to-analog converters (DACs) with analog signal conditioning blocks allowing them to
operate as a system-on-a-chip. Such devices blur the line between an FPGA, which carries
digital ones and zeros on its internal programmable interconnect fabric, and fieldprogrammable analog array (FPAA), which carries analog values on its internal
programmable interconnect fabric.
A FPGA from Altera
An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) , is an integrated circuit (IC)
customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use. For example, a
chip designed to run in a digital voice recorder or a high-efficiency Bitcoin miner is an ASIC.
Application-specific standard products (ASSPs) are intermediate between ASICs and
industry standard integrated circuits like the 7400 or the 4000 series.
As feature sizes have shrunk and design tools improved over the years, the maximum
complexity (and hence functionality) possible in an ASIC has grown from 5,000 gates to over
100 million. Modern ASICs often include entire microprocessors, memory blocks including
ROM, RAM, EEPROM, flash memory and other large building blocks. Such an ASIC is
often termed a SoC (system-on-chip). Designers of digital ASICs often use a hardware
description language (HDL), such as Verilog or VHDL, to describe the functionality of
ASICs.
A tray of Application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chips.
Any embedded application of integrated circuits seeks to minimize, simultaneously, four
factors:
- The number of transistors employed, which impacts die and package size, unit cost and
power consumption. Advances in process technology continuously reduce transistor area, but
both static and dynamic power consumption depend on the transistor count. The transistor
count remains an important metric of system efficiency.
- The number of clock cycles required, which impacts performance and power consumption.
Increasing clock frequencies associated with smaller process geometries permit more clock
cycles in a given time interval, but at the expense of increased power consumption. Fewer
clock cycles means less power consumption.
- The time taken to develop the application, which strongly influences its market acceptance.
A product that misses its market window is a total waste of development effort. In many
cases software development takes more time and costs more than hardware development.
- Nonrecurring engineering (NRE) costs such as mask manufacturing and the cost of
hardware and software development. The increased NRE costs associated with leading-edge
process technologies are putting these out of reach for many applications.
The four technologies represent different tradeoffs towards achieving the four optimizations.
The choice for any particular application is an engineering compromise. In most cases, the
choice depends on a complex combination of factors, and no single technology is ideal.
Different technology mixes are often most appropriate at different stages of the lifecycle of
the end-user product. During prototyping and production ramp-up an FPGA solution may be
preferable, in order to reduce development time and cost. When the product goes into high
volume, its functionality can be re-mapped into an ASIC that embeds the DSP core from the
standard product, and absorbs the logic from the FPGA, thereby optimizing die size, unit cost,
clock cycles and power consumption without the need to rewrite the software. The high NRE
costs associated with ASIC development are amortized over the high production volume.