Electronics design cannot cope with pace of market change. (IT News).

Improvements in the use of traditional electronics design automation (EDA) techniques will not address the problem of shrinking windows of market opportunity, according to the findings of a new user survey. Over 74 per cent of the survey respondents indicated that that more flexible designs using reconfigurable technologies were a better solution. The report "Reconfigurable Computing: a survey of user attitudes towards reprogrammable logic", presents feedback from more than 700 design engineers across the world. 45 per cent of the respondents were hardware designers, 12 per cent were software engineers, 41 per cent were both and two percent declined to indicate their field.

83 per cent of the survey's respondents stated that they plan to increase their use of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAS) on projects and 52 per cent indicated that their use of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICS) would fall. 44 per cent of software engineers and 40 per cent of hardware designers predicted a significant shift in the use of FPGAs away from glue logic, prototyping and ASIC replacement to become a platform for implementing flexible designs.

Comment: It is clear that traditional EDA tools are not effectively tackling some of the challenges facing design engineers. Mixing C- based design techniques and reprogrammable hardware you combine the abundance of engineers, speed of development, flexibility and capability for infield upgrades associated with the software world in the acceleration gamed by expressing functions in parallel hardware.

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