It was the best of times. Gordon Moore’s prophetic paper from 1965 did not predict the possibility of programmable logic, but in proclaiming that device densities were destined to grow at the startling rate of almost a factor of two every two years, it set the stage not only for the invention of FPGAs, but for their proliferation in a wide variety of applications. True to the law of Gordon Moore, programmable logic raced its way up the sophistication curve, fueled by the geometric increase in capability. During this time, the makers of FPGAs learned to listen to the voices of trusted advisors, their most sophisticated customers in the networking and telecommunications industry. Those voices said “ever bigger, ever faster,” which is the mantra of Moore’s law.

Traditionally, FPGA customers have valued high density, high pin counts, and high speed. They have typically placed a smaller premium on pricing, power, and ease of design. They have driven the FPGA vendors to produce flagship product lines with premium pricing such as Xilinx’s Virtex and Altera’s Stratix families.

It was the worst of times. The telecommunications and networking companies were suffering a serious draught, and their appetite for expensive FPGAs was at least temporarily sated. At the same time, it appeared that the bounty of Gordon Moore might be finally coming to an end after a forty year run. Exponentially increasing density had walked hand-in-hand with exponentially increasing development cost for each process generation, and the greater laws of finance and physics would inevitably show their might.

Geometries in FPGA have now reached the 90nm mark, and, for the first time, a new process node isn’t all good news. In the past, little compromise was required. Smaller geometries gave greater density, lower cost, higher speed, and lower power dissipation at lower supply voltages. Now, for the first time, designers are faced with a “choose your favorite two” situation. Leakage current causes power to actually increase at the 90nm node, and design compromises must be made to get around it. Many industry experts (and yes, we’ve all heard this several times before) are predicting an end to Moore’s law within the decade.

As Gordon’s law shows signs of running out of steam, another Moore is here to take his place in the FPGA environment. Geoffrey Moore’s books on adoption of new technologies by the market have become to many high-tech marketers what Gordon Moore’s prediction was to engineers: a treatise that puts their world into perspective over a relatively long period of time; a framework that puts their fast-changing environment into perspective and organizes it with some semblance of order. In “Crossing the Chasm” and “Inside the Tornado,” Moore describes the progression of new technologies penetrating the market, making their way from the bleeding-edge “innovators” to the progressive “early adopters,” across the “chasm” and onto “main street” where they become commonplace. [more]