Rajeev Jayaraman Xilinx Inc

FPGAs: Revolutionizing Digital System Design

FPGAs have revolutionized digital system design in the past 15 years. Their programmability and fast time-to-market have made them very popular with system designers. About 5 years ago, FPGAs were being used primarily as glue logic in systems.Ý Now, with the arrival of multi-million gate FPGAs, and the availability of a variety of system level features on them, FPGAs are being used to design complete systems on a chip. In this talk, I will explore a brief history of FPGAs while focussing on the most recent FPGA architecture from Xilinx, the Virtex-II architecture. I will show how FPGAs are no longer peripheral chips on a system but are the centerpiece ofÝ complete systems. I will conclude with an FPGA roadmap and areas of consideration for the future.

Bio
Rajeev Jayaraman is the Director of Physical Implementation Tools at Xilinx Inc. He received his B.Tech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 1985, and the M.S. and Ph.D degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1987 and 1991 respectively.Ý At Xilinx, he works on the physical design and timing analysis software for FPGAs. His interests are in physical design, FPGA architecture, graph theory, and algorithms. He was member of the ICCAD technical committee from 1995-1997. He received the Ross Freeman award for technical innovation at Xilinx in 2000 which is presented for technical innovation that had the greatest positive impact on Xilinx FPGAs.