hi ,

I am VLSI student from India , I want to know whether FPGA have good future and challenging job as ASIC jobs and having FPGA experience can we join as a ASIC design or verification engineer

Regards
Sunil

Hi,

Both are slightly different fields but they both share alot. If you're an FPGA developer you can definately move to ASIC without any trouble and vise versa. the restrictions in the design are different though.
Whether FPGAs have a 'future' or not that depends on the companies you wish to work on. Many companies prefer not to use FPGAs and instead they use other emulation and verification techniques to verify their ASIC designs. However, many other companies have a whole devision of FPGA designers that are responsible to emulate their ASIC designs on!

On the other hand, FPGAs are used in companies (especially startups) for quick, easy and 'cheap' prototyping

Im not sure if this answers your question?

Hi Sunil,

It would be a mistake to see FPGA's as only a prototyping technology. They are also used in a wide range of applications where an ASIC cannot be justified. ASICs have a lot of up front cost ($10k - $10M) and the manufacturing process extends your time to market.

In high volume, ASICs are cheap, lower power, faster and can be larger (in terms of circit size), but they are inflexible. FPGAs are flexible, and in low volume they are cheap. However they use a lot more power, are slower, and cannot be as large.

That's unlikely to change anytime soon, so there will continue to be two markets, both thriving. As badmanjoe noted, in any case, switching between the two technologies is not that difficult. The hard bit is being a good designer.

HTH,


Jeremy