The Rising Wave of Field Programmability

摘要

There have been alternating cycles of standardization and customization in the semiconductor industry, which I first noticed in 1987. It later appeared in Electronics Weekly (U.K.) in January 1991 under the name of Makimoto's wave. As shown in Fig. 1, there have been changes in direction roughly every ten years. A prediction was made, more than ten years ago, that field programmability would become a leading technology during the standardization cycle that would start around 1997. Today, the prediction has come true and we are seeing a rising wave of field programmable technologies.