This time, we will delve into the importance of FPGA technology in audio equipment and its amazing performance. FPGA is a core technology in many high-performance audio devices. Let's unravel its appeal.
Exploring FPGA
Just as there is the causality dilemma of "which came first, the chicken or the egg," when asked about the parent of high-end SIGMA-DELTA architectures like ESS9018, AK4497, and CS43198, we at LUXURY & PRECISION unequivocally answer: the parent of all these is 'FPGA.'
What is FPGA?
FPGA officially stands for "Field-Programmable Gate Array." In Japanese, it means "an integrated circuit whose configuration can be set." FPGA is known as a "universal digital chip" that can simulate the functions of most digital logic chips.
While there are differences in quality, a high-quality FPGA has a wide variety of internal "parts" and "accessories," allowing for a broad range of digital chip scales and types to be created through combination.
The Originator of Digital Chips
FPGA was born in the 1980s and quickly became essential for digital chip development. Before FPGA, digital chip development could only be done by direct production at wafer factories. If a problem was found during the design phase, it was necessary to search for the problem among a large number of discarded products. Naturally, there were times when problems could not be solved and only resulted in wasted costs. However, by adopting FPGA, the development process was greatly simplified, and most problems could be resolved by simulating before production.
Large chip companies like INTEL also first simulate with FPGAs when designing complex chips such as CPUs and GPUs, and then proceed with production at wafer factories if there are no issues. Although FPGA development systems are expensive, ranging from millions to tens of millions of dollars, chip development companies have long relied on FPGAs for their designs.
Two Major Companies
In today's FPGA market, FPGA has truly become the "darling of the times." FPGA chips have a parallel structure and are programmable in real-time. In the current AI era, where parallel computing is mainstream, the momentum of FPGAs is unstoppable.
Originally, there were two major players in the FPGA market: XILINX and ALTERA. These two companies dominated over 90% of the market. INTEL, the king of the CPU market, believed in the future of FPGAs and acquired ALTERA. As a result, INTEL also became a major player in the FPGA market.
IFTD
Major companies like Apple and Intel hold annual technical forums. These events gather many people to discuss industry trends and showcase products, such as IDF (Intel Developer Forum) and Apple's WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference). Currently, Intel is also focusing on FPGAs, leading to the creation of IFTD (Intel FPGA Technology Day). This is a technical event for FPGA developers. This year, LUXURY & PRECISION was also invited, allowing us to check the latest trends in FPGAs and gain valuable experience. (Held on September 21, 2018)
FPGA and Audio Equipment
In the previous "Exploring FPGA" section, we covered the overview of FPGA. This time, we will discuss FPGA and audio equipment.
Over 30 Billion Transistors – 3 Times That of a High-End Server CPU
Which chip uses the most transistors? Many would answer a high-end server CPU. A CPU can have dozens of cores and contain approximately 10 billion transistors. However, that number is small compared to the highest-end FPGAs. The INTEL STRATIX 10 FPGA has 30 billion transistors, which is two to three times that of a server CPU. Furthermore, the latest FPGAs not only contain millions of LUTs (Look-Up Tables) but also many hardware components such as 16GB of HBM2 high-bandwidth memory, a 4-core ARM Cortex A53, and dozens of 58Gbps high-speed PAM4 transceivers. FPGA is truly the transistor monster.
9.2 Trillion Floating-Point Operations Per Second – 50 Times That of the Strongest DSP
You have just understood which chip is the king of transistors, but the reasons for applying FPGA continue. Which chip currently excels most in floating-point operations? Many would answer DSP (Digital Signal Processor). DSPs specialize in floating-point operations. TI's TMS320C6678 is currently the best DSP, with 8 DSP cores, a single-core frequency of 1.4GHz, and a floating-point operation capability of 224 GFLOPs. However, this capability is also small compared to FPGAs. FPGAs can have thousands of DSP blocks through parallel computing, and the latest FPGA STRATIX 10 has a peak processing speed of 9.2 TFLOPS (9.2 trillion operations), which is about 50 times that of the strongest DSP.
Impact on Audio Equipment
With numerous internal transistors and the ability to arrange many excellent floating-point DSP blocks in parallel, FPGAs enable highly precise digital signal processing. This allows for significantly more efficient complex processing of audio signals, such as noise reduction, echo cancellation, and equalization. The high parallel computing power enables advanced processing like the simultaneous application of multiple audio effects and real-time audio data processing at overwhelming speeds, making it suitable for high-precision sound reproduction.
Furthermore, FPGAs are field-programmable, allowing new features to be added and performance to be improved through firmware updates even after the product has shipped.
Current State of Chinese FPGA Manufacturers – The Only Problem is Software
Currently, Chinese-made chips are a hot topic. Chinese FPGA manufacturers include Gowin, AGM, Zhiduo Jing, Anlu, and Guowei. Guowei, like a Chinese state-owned enterprise, has ample financial resources, supported by Tsinghua Unigroup. Other manufacturers mainly produce small chips and cater to the Chinese market.
What Lao Wang (L&P Chief Engineer) regrets most is Jingwei Yage, which has now ceased operations. This manufacturer had many LUX products and a convenient FPGA with a 300MHz Cortex M3 and many interfaces. We simulated for two years, from the early stages of development until it could actually be used. However, Jingwei Yage went out of business before it could be used in a finished product, so the plan was aborted. Lao Wang regrets, "If Jingwei Yage were still around today, the situation would be vastly different."
(Written in 2018)
*Editor's note included