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4.1 FPGAs in Mission-Critical Applications
Mission-critical applications (e.g., autonomous vehicle, defense and intelligence, manufacturing, smart
agriculture, smart cities, etc.) require deterministic low-latency. The data flow pattern in such applications may
be in streaming form, requiring pipelined-oriented processing. FPGAs are excellent for these kinds of use
cases given their support for fine-grained, bit level operations in comparison to CPU and GPUs. FPGAs also
provide customizable I/O, allowing their integration with these sorts of applications.
In autonomous driving or factory automation where response time can be critical, one benefit of FPGAs is that
they allow tailored logic for dedicated functions. This means that the FPGA logic becomes custom circuitry but
highly reconfigurable, yielding very low compute time and latency. Another key factor may be power – the
cost per performance per watt may be of concern when determining long-term viability. Since the logic in
FPGA has been tailored for a specific application/workload, the logic is very efficient at executing that
application which leads to lower power or increased perf per watt. By comparison, CPUs may need to execute
1000’s of instructions to perform the same function that an FPGA maybe able to implement in just a few
cycles.
Figure 4. Examples of mission-critical applications require deterministic, fast response.